At the age of eleven, little Johnny Berndt made his first recordings of avant-garde music, and, thirty years later, he doesn't seem to have slowed his pace. Berndt has released over forty recordings, and is highly active in his hometown of Baltimore both as a performer, and as a driving force behind the yearly High Zero festival and Red Room performance space. The Private Language Problem collects some of Berndt's latest electro-acoustic compositions in a compilation of tracks that are diverse in approach, even if largely homogeneous in character.

Berndt is a voracious seeker of new sounds; this album alone features instruments of Berndt's design, a "Shadow" audio filter that uses spectral filtering to marry a sound source and its repeated self, and Berndt's polyphonic feedback technique. Despite what its title might imply, however, the results of The Private Language Problem don't sound particularly singular to Berndt's work, and the whether his voicings and syntax differ from the norm, the final sonic result often doesn't reflect the unique tools and techniques of which Berndt makes use. The humming clank and clatter of "Grace," the gentle, ragged tones of "Enough Pain," and the unpredictable, flittering swarm of trunacted feedback in "Sounds of Madness" are each interesting in their own right, but not without compare in the realm of experimental music. This is all well and good; were complete novelty in sound a requirement for new music, record stores would be lonely places, but The Private Language Problem is one of those discs that, approached unaware, doesn't always reflect the unusual means of its creation in the final sound. "Older Now," which closes the disc is perhaps its most surprising, not particularly because of the oddity of its sound, but, instead, its familiarity. The Shadow filter is used to warp the output of an acoustic guitar, but the original timbral character of the instrument bleeds through, a rare familiarity amongst more alien sound.

Like the crackling fire largely reduced to sine wave tones in "Dry," Berndt's compositions take sound through transformations, with little audio presented unaltered. The ingenuity with which Berdnt works is impressive, even if it isn't always obvious in the music's final form, and The Private Language Problem shows that even if Berndt is often speaking his own language, he's got no problems communicating well with others.