“Nothing is impossible.” That was Susan Alcorn’s assessment of the potential of the pedal steel guitar, the peculiar instrument that she made her own. Alcorn passed away at 71 in January 2025 as possibly the world’s pre-eminent pedal steel player, driven by a vision to bring as much out of it as possible and, in doing so, to gracefully apprehend and interpret whatever music caught her interest. In her final years, Alcorn joined forces with Nomad War Machine, the Philadelphia duo of drummer Julius Masri and guitarist James Reichard; Contra Madre is her first posthumous release, and her first documented foray into metal-adjacent spheres after a lifetime playing country, jazz, and free improv. Her first album with “these metal guys from Philly” is an unconventional experiment, even for her, but the challenge brings out the ethos that made her such a singular voice, regardless of what she was playing.
Adapted from colonial Hawaiian steel guitar and adopted by country musicians in the 1950s, the pedal steel is a remarkably versatile instrument. Produced by an array of pedals and levers that involve nearly the whole body, and an endless system of tuning and setup configurations called copedents, its sliding tone spirals allow players a freedom of expression that complicates the instrument’s reputation as a signifier of honky-tonk Americana. Alcorn saw how far the pedal steel could go, and spent over 50 years traveling the world and expanding its vocabulary—into tango, Chilean nueva canción, jazz and classical quintets—all while noting how each of these musical traditions coursed through the material cultures that created them, emerging out of the day-to-day debris of history.
In Nomad War Machine, she found kindred spirits who loved the same Western swing bands she grew up on, extreme improvisers aligned with her vision of coaxing out the “tiny notes between the notes” of standard playing to evoke the widest possible range of meaning. Reichard crafts his own fretless guitars, exploring the dimensions of nontraditional microtonal tuning; Masri, a multi-instrumentalist originally from Tripoli, Lebanon, has performed with acts like Jamaladeen Tacuma and the Sun Ra Arkestra, while solo projects like 2021’s The Arabic Room use jarring, bric-a-brac sounds to critique the limiting lenses through which the West views the aesthetics of the Arab world.
When you listen to enough improv ensembles, it can be easy to treat their playing in purely abstract terms, and their instruments as static categories. This trio reminds you that their instruments are physical tools whose roles have evolved over time: intricate pieces of industrial technology borne out of a volatile world, one that chews up and spits out any tradition it touches, but offers space for careful stewardship and reflection, too. When Alcorn works alongside another guitarist, like Reichard, your ears are drawn to the relative clarity of the pedal steel’s timbres, and the ways it seems to subtly shapeshift between multiple instruments at once. She can make it snarl like a barroom band, finding scuzzy counterpoint with Reichard, or slough off glassy, psychedelic peals like a synthesizer. Set against Nomad War Machine’s apocalyptic, detuned intensity, the steady currents of Alcorn’s playing have a tectonic power, like rivers of lava scouring the landscape to remake the terrain beneath them. Jagged sheets of tension and dissonance from Reichard and Masri get swept up in the mellow simplicity of her bending chords, and every twinge and twang brings a rush of feeling. The album’s calmer passages feel like a more complete version of the leisurely pedal steel ambient that’s proliferated in recent years—surging with too much emotion for the strings to contain, too much atmosphere to fit on a postcard.
There’s a stern, deliberate quality to Contra Madre that sets it apart from the parts of Alcorn’s oeuvre rooted in folk or jazz. But it’s driven by the same instincts that make her other work seem to express something ineffable about the way musical subcultures fit into the world. Masri’s drumming is lithe and spacious even at its most aggressive; just as Alcorn’s guitar slides move with a gravity-defying, naturalistic force, his attacks seem to sprout out of each other independently, emerging in thickets. Alcorn matches the duo’s capacity to shred, sending plumes of fury sliding out from her strings like the calls of a tornado siren. Occasionally, she’ll break up the ecstatic energy to interpolate a discernible melody or riff that gestures at the sweep of her earlier career—sometimes with a comic touch, like the chipper bossa nova-ish passage on “Grotto That Returns the Echo of My Cry.” On “Boiling Vortex,” the trio spends nearly eight minutes tunneling into an escalating jam, guided by layered drumming from Masri that constantly slips away from the groove. About halfway through, Alcorn pulls out a brief improvisation that sounds suspiciously like “Simple Gifts,” the Shaker theme made famous by Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring. You could read this as wry commentary on the violence of the Great American Songbook, a vision of the desolation underlying the idyllic image of the frontier.
Although Contra Madre isn’t explicitly political, a political reading of the music is self-evident. Nomad War Machine named their duo after a concept from philosophers Deleuze and Guittari’s A Thousand Plateaus—a subversive, “deterritorializing” force of creative expression that resists the state’s attempts to keep our social worlds regimented. Behind Alcorn’s plainspoken, lyrical style was an understanding of the way historical contingencies influenced music’s development, like the ’50s American primitive guitar movement’s borrowing from Indian classical composition, or the patterns of migration and technological change that gave rise to different cities’ jazz and country scenes. Nomad War Machine and Alcorn’s volcanic interplay creates a frothing musical petri dish, where questions like “what’s the difference between a free-jazz drummer and a grindcore drummer?” or “when does a guitar stop sounding like a guitar and start sounding like a banjo, or an oud?” become intuitive.
Free-jazz innovator Sonny Sharrock said he “hated” the guitar. He found it cumbersome, poorly suited for the Coltrane-indebted sliding vocalizations he nevertheless managed to play. Alcorn loved the pedal steel, but in her patient playing you can hear the same sort of resolve—to wrangle her instrument’s Rube Goldberg mechanics into whatever shapes and tones a moment calls for, and to pour herself into the honest work of musicianship, so that she could convey each musical lineage in its fullness, without fluff or shortcuts.
If there’s a skeleton key to understanding Alcorn’s ethos, it’s her 2006 essay “The Road, the Radio and the Full Moon.” On the surface, it’s an account of a few days as a professional musician in Texas—she travels around a few cities, playing in hired bands and listening to the radio—but as she moves through the world, she does so much more to contextualize and deepen the music: charting the histories of different scenes, the alienating sprawl of the suburbs, the annoying personality quirks of strangers she plays with, the local legends that make up everyone’s cultural memory, and how they all show up in the choices musicians make and the social circles they inhabit. Regarding her pull toward death metal in old age, Alcorn said, “I’m 70 years old—I think about death!” Her posthumous album with Nomad War Machine is a celebration of the vertiginous possibility of life, and a capstone on a career that took none of it for granted.
