"She pushes the twin envelopes of sonic possibilities and emotional involvement in music. Just when you think you've heard it all."
Bobby Lee
Steel Guitar Forum
Alcorn is a rare musician who embraces the full spectrum of expressive possibilities for an instrument to communicate a full human experience instead of a restricted aesthetic paradigm. She's a maverick and her solo recordings are destined to become classics that we turn to year after year for relief from common music.
-- Michael Anton Parker
Downtown Music Gallery
From the relatively unadorned sound of pedal steel and amplifier, Susan Alcorn brings forth music that is as full of emotional honesty as it is of melodic and harmonic exploration and surprise. She possesses a virtuosic technique that is always at the service of the musical moment and its possibilities for expression and communication.
- Kevin Macneil Brown
Dusted Magazine
"And maybe this why people describe Alcorn's playing as 'experimental,' because she doesn't need, and is more talented than needing, to take a conventional approach to get her point across. She played contrary note progressions, so like a Pollock painting, it wasn't exactly obvious what she was trying to do at the beginning of a song. But, once six minutes had passed and I could see how the seemingly incongruous pieces of the song had come together, her art BEGAN to make sense. The key word is began. I didn't get to full understanding, and that was some of the fun and challenge of the music.
Like a good painting, Alcorn's music wasn't exactly
supposed to be figured out on the first listen. You need to take a second, closer look."
LiveNewOrleans.com
"Alcorn's pedal steel tones stretch, float, and dance in the air and ears expressing something that's worlds beyond words, yet able to communicate on the deepest level."
- Pete Gershon, Signal to Noise
The surprise standout of High Zero 2004 was Susan Alcorn, a free-improvising pedal steel player from Houston, Tex. . . . from Hendrixian distorted pyrotechnics and slide-clanging on the fretboard calamity to slowly warming swells and hovering tones as sci-fi as a theremin, Alcorn charms a complex, expressive, and intimately responsive vocabulary out of her instrument, enabling her to compliment noisy, ceiling-climbing swells or barely audible quiets
- Bret McCabe, City Paper (Baltimore)
"Lastly, Susan Alcorn appeared with her double-necked pedal steel and continued the exploratory journey to great effect. Sometimes using two bars, sometimes on the body of the instrument, she woke people up to the possibilities of this instrument. . . just as Britten, in his "reverse variation" reveals Come Heavy Sleep at the end of his piece, Alcorn concluded with a very moving paraphrase of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready, a piece which seems to draw equally on the African-American twin traditions of religion and revolution. Given the context (old church) and recent events (billionaire in the grip of radical right Christians takes over the world) it seemed appropriate."
Steve Beresford, Resonance (UK)
"Alcorn is a great player who has mastered and redefined an unlikely instrument . . . With an exquisite touch she invoked the history of her instrument, extended its emotional and ethereal strengths, and explored its microtonal possibilities, drawing it out of contexts that traditionally render it invisible -- or generic -- and placing it into its own mature discourse . . . reminding improvisors that "free" includes the right to be romantic, melodic, and eight to the bar."
- Chris Cutler, The Wire (UK)
Her radical deep listening approach to the steel guitar . . . is a revelation."
- Ed Baxter, London Musicians Collective
"She has opened this beautiful instrument in amazing ways."
- Pauline Oliveros, The Wire (UK)
"She's a beautiful player, capable of sweet, longing lines or ghostly resonances. She's got big ears, as they say in jazz."
-Peter Marsh, BBC Experimental Review