The Brooklyn Rail

I would have a hard time remembering musicians who gave me an impression of erudition as easily as did Wendy Eisenberg. Within an hour of meeting them, I had heard incisive remarks on Susan Howe’s reading of Emily Dickinson, casual appeals to Boris Groys and Ross Posnock, and pointed allusions to the formative power of the Rothko Chapel and The Cloud of Unknowing, never mind properly musical references to dozens of jazz masters, Robert Wyatt, or Joanna Newsom. Eisenberg claims this knowledge has little to do with their music, but when pushed for a self-definition later on they said: “at one point, I read [Deleuze’s] Difference and Repetition, and then it broke my brain open, and now I play sixty different types of guitar.”

Eisenberg means their guitar grammar has grown exponentially, to the point it now seems like the instrument can hold a multiplicity of other instruments inside it, in proper Deleuzian manner. Since their solo debut in 2017, with the deconstructed bedroom folk of Time Machine (HEC), Eisenberg has been occupied with a disorienting schedule of releases, collaborations, tours, lectures, and publications. The most recent of these is a live record with David Grubbs and Bonner Kramer as the supergroup Squanderers, but in the last year alone, Eisenberg has played in the legendary Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, released a performance of compositions by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, and acted as supporting musician for Caroline Davis, claire rousay, More Eaze, and others. Before that, they were playing with John Zorn—including his infamous game piece Cobra “so many, many times”—Shane Parish, Jessica Pavone, Luke Stewart, Strictly Missionary, and their own rock bands, Editrix and Birthing Hips.

Amid this vortex of life and labor, Eisenberg also found the time to release a couple of crafty solo works, including this year’s Viewfinder (American Dreams, 2024), a grandiose, eighty-minute concept album about getting Lasik eye surgery. The record fires through a series of inventive experiments in composition that function as metonymy for Eisenberg’s ability to juggle together seemingly incongruous projects—because, and I quote them, “how different is anything?” Each track on Viewfinder is like a microcosm, an autonomous adventure with its own internal logic. After each is done, you feel like the next could go anywhere else in terms of structure and affect. And there is something else the tracks share with Eisenberg’s broader trajectory: each seems to entail re-learning the guitar from scratch. Its Shape Is Your Touch (Vin Du Select Qualitite, 2018) was a slow and broken meditation on string timbre, while The Machinic Unconscious (Tzadik, 2018) offered no-wave jazz noise exercises; for Auto (Ba Da Bing!, 2020), they planned a delicate contraction and dilation of the guitar’s rhythms around bright vocal lines, and for Bent Ring (Dear Life, 2021) focused on the banjo’s potential to produce pastoral freak outs. The only contiguity between these records is “this insane set of contextualizers and sonic signs” that we conveniently call the guitar, in its varied forms.

One reason it’s difficult to find musicians with the same intellectual verve as Eisenberg is that musical thinking is mostly done through the instrument, in the space of play it makes available to muscle memory and embodied imagination. The number of ways one can play a guitar is definitely larger than one, but also definitely smaller than infinity. The very topology of the instrument suggests a limited array of gestures that are ready-to-hand, and with time these become modes of thought, the links between hand and tool sort of circumvent the brain. To expand the possibilities of construction, you need to challenge established kernels and intentionally break path dependencies by constantly revising the creative process. This is what improvisation can do—Cornelius Cardew used to encourage musicians to unlearn their instrument’s idioms in order to improvise. Perhaps this is why Eisenberg is so interested in other avant-garde artists who actively dismantle musical parameters, like Feldman and Wolff.

I’m not sure improvisation is why Eisenberg cites Jonathan Crary and Baruch Spinoza in the liner notes to Viewfinder, but I’m pretty sure their cerebral personality is the reason they improvise at all. There is, in improvisation, this attempt to abduct the outside in real-time; that is, to at all times move beyond previous models, to keep some anxiety against static templates. It’s commonplace to say artists love peripheries and in-betweens because they all seek the freedom to go beyond given boundaries. In Eisenberg’s case, though, there’s a studied decision to always move toward more difference, more evasion from the norm, more refined niches and “minor aesthetics” (to go back to the Deleuzian vocabulary). One example of this is their refusal to fit within standard career templates and marketing efforts like this very profile. Eisenberg would rather the records tell the story, and their spoken-word lyrics are indeed weirdly transparent at that. Another example is their desire to collaborate across generations, like in the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, where age gaps allow them “to wear it like [they’re] the baby, because [they] usually don’t get to do that otherwise.” There is an attraction to becoming something they’re not—becoming-baby, maybe, once in a while—drifting away from oneself. I remind them that “genre” and “gender” are the same word in Portuguese, and they laugh.

Eisenberg also laughs—and seems flattered—when I say their songs have an unfinished quality, yet another way of saying they are open, full of breathing spaces, unexpected misdirections, lines of flight. They say this might be related to the dailiness of their practice, which has entirely altered their “notion of time and scale and completion.” The longest Eisenberg ever spent writing a piece, they tell me, “is probably three or four hours… If you do the practice of improvisation all the time, you can’t really recover from it.” Playing everyday, as if it was a therapy and a foray, leads to a certain attitude toward the finished sonic artwork, now itself a rehearsal of sorts, although there is “nothing being rehearsed for, which would then be what? Dying?” Be it as it may, Eisenberg’s guitar is essayistic, in both the later sense of a “philosophical treatise” and in the original sense, of a “speculative test.”