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LP
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BING 163LP
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LP version. "Drawing the connections between Wendy Eisenberg's releases feels like undertaking a wide-ranging investigation. Albums of wildly inventive guitar, tempo-shifting avant rock and curiously leftfield pop fit together as offerings of Eisenberg's curious mind. On Auto, their most innovative and inner-reaching album yet, Eisenberg explores emotional, subjective truth, and how it interacts with an objectivity no person alone can grasp. Inspired by the solo work of Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) and David Sylvian's Blemish, with playing skills that have already seen them climbing Best Guitarist lists and an unvarnished vocal immediacy, Wendy Eisenberg has created an album of subtle display that resonates with maximal impact. Auto has multiple meanings. First, automobile: 'A lot of these songs were written about and mentally take place when I'm in the car on my way to gigs,' says Eisenberg. Immediate melodies came to them on these trips, to which they'd later add complex guitar parts. And automata: 'I make myself into a machine, which is why everything that's played is precise.' Finally, they frame their work in the literary technique of auto-fiction, 'the semi-fictionalized presentation of the self in a narrative form of growth,' as Eisenberg sees it. The album served as a means toward working through emotional conflicts from adolescent trauma and PTSD, and dissects the dissolution and conflict that led towards the breakup of their former band. With much of it written while its events played out, Auto faces the grief of losing what one thinks is their future while experiencing a dramatic reshaping of their past; it delves openly into the limited nature of one person's narrative. After making a few efforts to record Auto, Eisenberg ultimately chose to collaborate with childhood friend Nick Zanca, who contributes electronic elements and production. Mirroring the personal and organic offered by Eisenberg, synthetic sounds form a kind of boundary or context for everything. They 'sound like commentary on songs that were written from an organic or subjective perspective,' says Eisenberg. Their place on the album is integral for Eisenberg's goal 'to outweigh the subjectivity of normal singer-songwriter guitar songs with the objectivity of electronic sound.'"
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CD
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BING 163CD
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"Drawing the connections between Wendy Eisenberg's releases feels like undertaking a wide-ranging investigation. Albums of wildly inventive guitar, tempo-shifting avant rock and curiously leftfield pop fit together as offerings of Eisenberg's curious mind. On Auto, their most innovative and inner-reaching album yet, Eisenberg explores emotional, subjective truth, and how it interacts with an objectivity no person alone can grasp. Inspired by the solo work of Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) and David Sylvian's Blemish, with playing skills that have already seen them climbing Best Guitarist lists and an unvarnished vocal immediacy, Wendy Eisenberg has created an album of subtle display that resonates with maximal impact. Auto has multiple meanings. First, automobile: 'A lot of these songs were written about and mentally take place when I'm in the car on my way to gigs,' says Eisenberg. Immediate melodies came to them on these trips, to which they'd later add complex guitar parts. And automata: 'I make myself into a machine, which is why everything that's played is precise.' Finally, they frame their work in the literary technique of auto-fiction, 'the semi-fictionalized presentation of the self in a narrative form of growth,' as Eisenberg sees it. The album served as a means toward working through emotional conflicts from adolescent trauma and PTSD, and dissects the dissolution and conflict that led towards the breakup of their former band. With much of it written while its events played out, Auto faces the grief of losing what one thinks is their future while experiencing a dramatic reshaping of their past; it delves openly into the limited nature of one person's narrative. After making a few efforts to record Auto, Eisenberg ultimately chose to collaborate with childhood friend Nick Zanca, who contributes electronic elements and production. Mirroring the personal and organic offered by Eisenberg, synthetic sounds form a kind of boundary or context for everything. They 'sound like commentary on songs that were written from an organic or subjective perspective,' says Eisenberg. Their place on the album is integral for Eisenberg's goal 'to outweigh the subjectivity of normal singer-songwriter guitar songs with the objectivity of electronic sound.'"
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LP
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VDSQ 023LP
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2018 release. Wendy Eisenberg is an extraordinary guitarist dedicated to the completely unconstrained exploration of music, language and time. Her work has taken her from conservatory to DIY space to concert hall, from performing improvised music and punk-metal to writing the quietest of songs. On Its Shape is Your Touch, Eisenberg turns her gaze to the guitar in its most absolute, essential form. Having traversed musical genres as she has, the intricate improvisations she weaves on this record have as much to do with the vast history and musical conventions that she chooses to leave out as the sounds she chooses to play. In the process Eisenberg invents a vibrant, fiercely unique language all her own. The artist in her own words: "The title Its Shape is Your Touch, from the final line the Richard Brautigan poem 'Here is something beautiful,' is one-half of the thesis of this record. The other, the absent antithesis, comes from the William Gaddis novel The Recognitions: 'you can change a line without touching it.' The shape of the guitar is the context for the sounds it makes; your touch activates this machine, alters, creates and transforms its possibilities. The shape is created and outlined by the touch, but it contains absence, undefined space. In my music, the lines change with and without physical touch: my touch creates the sound, but those sounds expand, contract, rotate, and dance as I re-establish and constantly evolve the contexts and boundaries of this world. This record has to do with absence, the spaces and movements implied by the lines of a sketch and the other worlds that choice of representation chooses to ignore. I want to let linearity be not a crutch but a device for intelligent travel through musical space. I like to think of these recordings as a gentle exorcism. Recorded in a year of significant, deep loss, it is hard for me not to hear this record as a kind of metamorphosis, a blood-letting, a culling and casting of musical and personal values. This music is reflection on loss and implication: a bluessless blues."
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LP
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FTR 402LP
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"Time Machine is a reissue of a 2017 cassette, and represents the first vinyl issued by Wendy Eisenberg, a peripatetic improviser and composer currently based in Amherst. We first heard of Wendy when she was playing with a blasted quartet called Birthing Hips, whose NNA cassette was an instant classic. Since then she's begun a solo career that branches off in a lot of directions simultaneously. She has an album of post-form noise-metal (in trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith) due soon on John Zorn's Tzadik label. She has an LP of acoustic guitar improvs coming up on Steve Lowenthal's VDSQ imprint. And then there's Time Machine -- a gloriously intimate suite of bedroom pop miniatures that makes us suspect she can do about anything she sets her mind to. The music on Time Machine is arranged sparingly and sung with real warmth. Although everyone thinks I'm nuts for mentioning it, I am reminded in spots of the Space Lady's outsider take on keyboard pop. But there are also large parts of this record that put me in mind of Elisa Ambrogio's solo work as well as the singing she does with 200 Years, meaning there's a sense of inherent wildness being reined in a bit, all for the sake of the songs. Time Machine is a wonderfully flowing album. Small parts of the instrumentation hint at the stranger vistas Ms. Eisenberg's music can explore, reminding us that this is but one of her guises. But it's a damn good one, and we're very happy she let us help document it." --Byron Coley, 2018. Edition of 250.
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