feature photo: Charmaine Lee
When it comes to guitarists, Wendy Eisenberg stands on an island, a virtuosic talent who is not remotely similar to any other virtuosic talent. Eisenberg’s insistence on going Eisenberg’s own way has resulted in output that confronts head-on our notions of what music is supposed to sound like, even when this guitar ace is in singer-songwriter mode.
Only by being so open-minded and outside the box leads to truly original art, and Eisenberg has just made more of that kind of art again with the latest release, Bloodletting (Out of Your Head Records).
Bloodletting is the de facto follow-up to 2018’s Its Shape Is your Touch, but like any other Eisenberg project, there’s a new twist. Here, Eisenberg plays four movements on solo guitar for one disc and the same four movements on solo banjo for the second disc. Actually, that’s not even close to the most intriguing aspect of how Eisenberg approached these recordings: Eisenberg wrote out the score in block text instead of notation and memorized it. Then, Eisenberg played these pieces from memory.
Memory is, of course, imperfect. Those imperfections built into memory is also what makes us our most human. This is what Eisenberg sought out to do with Bloodletting, to create a very humanly unique performance not through straight-up improvisation but via a truly novel approach that taps into the unique way one’s brain is wired.
For “Bloodletting,” Eisenberg turns the guitar into an orchestral stringed instrument — akin to a cello or bass — sawing through most of the piece with tenacity before breaking into lightly plucked pensive moments. The banjo version is the first time many of us are hearing Eisenberg on this instrument and it soon becomes apparent that like the guitar, they don’t care one whit about playing it the way it’s ‘supposed’ to be played, attacking the strings from different angles, using uncommon percussive impacts and playing out unusual progressions. Put another way, Eisenberg plays the banjo with an idiosyncrasy similar to how they approach the guitar. It’s made yet more unusual in that the piece ends up getting perhaps fragmented and re-ordered due to the randomness of recall. That also made for widely divergent readings of “Bloodletting” that goes beyond the different instruments; I suspected so as soon as noticing that the banjo version ran about 40% longer than the guitar one.
It’s fun but not all that important to the listener to compare and contrast between the two versions of each song. It’s better to appreciate each of the eight tracks as unique entities. Eisenberg on guitar performs some pretty amazing (mostly) single line picking on “Ostara” slowing down to jump on another interesting idea and then seemingly ties it to previously introduced concepts. That could also describe the banjo version to a large degree and yet it could hardly sound more different.
The guitar rendition of “Scherzo” manipulates time and space, eschewing density for clarity for much of the performance but building up to a crest, interjecting chimed and clipped notes along the way. “Coda” focuses more on full chords and how they’re placed.
On banjo, “Scherzo” charges out the gate, settling into some meditation that like its guitar counterpart, features pretty moments, while the sheer dexterity displayed on “Coda” is staggering and perhaps unprecedented for that instrument.
The uncompromising Wendy Eisenberg continues to rewrite the rules for composing, guitar and, now, banjo.
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