Alan Sondheim - Future Speed Future (2019)

Alan Sondheim with Azure Carter, building on his legacy of innovative music that resists genre, that opens awkward and unfathomable worlds of sound, played on traditional instruments without effects.

Public Eyesore has released Future Speed Future, with seventeen high-speed solos and duets, with guitar, viola, saz, dutar, oud, and voice. Speed is critical here - Sondheim plays as fast as possible, the notes often at a furious pace. It's a study in thinking, where conscious thought and repetition are impossible. It's also a study in a different kind of music, approaching Sondheim's limits of fast improvisation - scales, harmony, and rhythms tumble and change from one moment to another.

Sondheim says "What I do here - I play as fast as possible. By every means possible. Working in ways in which I try not to repeat things I already know, trying to harness speed without being too much aware of what I have done before. So that it is future speed future and this is future speed future. And so I'm riding the contour of what I'm hearing, and my fingers are flailing as if I were out of control, or as if the music were in control, and I could hardly follow the music. Azure Carter's songs are beautiful and provide a depth and balance to the mayhem. So the result is this cd, whose content is poetics and speed and what speed can do and what happens when you make it or hear it.

"I shape the contour, on every instrument, fingers straining to produce what i'm hearing internally, desperate to mind the intervals, remembering constantly, what came before, what is projected through the possibilities, whatever i'm playing, ranging across different sonoroties - I move among these, create circulations among things i've heard in my mind, where everything is perfectly in pitch, where it's almost as if i were capable of shattered and sutured worlds. there's strings, bow, always winding and unwinding tensions, nervous playing, even anxiety, anything i can use in
order to produce the surfaces of the imaginary i'm shape-riding, i'm circulating, i'm inhabiting. there is always the sound itself; am i letting everything down in this regard. i don't know, i've moved on to the next figure, next position, remembering the ruptured melodic arches that mark and remark me on the way to certain dissolution."