Viewfinder

On their double-LP Viewfinder, improviser, composer, and experimental guitarist Wendy Eisenberg skillfully commands an array of incongruent styles and emotions, painting a dense sound picture that ties together a conceptual song cycle with large group improvisation, and moving gracefully through musical wavelengths that could easily conflict. Inspired in part by a surgical procedure that Eisenberg had to correct a lifetime of vision problems, some of the songs refer directly to that experience. The plainspoken lyrics of opening track “Lasik” describe the healing process, with Eisenberg singing in a droning, melodically minimal way as they lay out the slow, strange weeks after the operation as their sight became clearer. The song breaks out of its foreboding hummingbird hover midway through, going from clusters of heavy minor-key notes into a fast, frenetic scatter of guitar sweeps and a lively, nearly Tropicalia-informed instrumentation. “If this wasn’t true it would be the most heavy-handed metaphor. But yes, I changed my eyesight,” Eisenberg states near the end of the song, emphasizing that in this case, the song is about an actual Lasik treatment they underwent, but not entirely undoing the intensity of the song’s repeated refrain of “changing isn’t healing.” A similar blurry duality courses through the entirety of Viewfinder. Though first and foremost a guitarist capable of both shudderingly beauty and flamethrower noise attacks, Eisenberg moves from haunted minimalism (as on the slow-motion melting of “If an Artist”) to avant-garde clatter (“Set a Course”) to deep space stillness where they set the guitar down completely, opting to just sing a few spare lines instead (“Viewfinder - Intro”). On the album’s centerpiece, “After Image,” Eisenberg is joined by bassist Carmen Q. Rothwell, drummer Booker Stardrum, trombonist Zekereyya el-Magharbel, keyboardist Andrew Links, and trumpet player Chris Williams. Recorded at a live performance, the 22-minute improvisation flows organically from a laid-back, lost-in-thought midtempo groove into a whir of percussion and sparse electronics. At the ten-minute mark it’s a musique concrete piece, heavy on space and the uncomfortable meeting of natural and digital sounds. By the song’s end, Eisenberg and their cohort are in full free jazz territory, having traversed light Brazilian-flavored grooves, formless academic noise, and Sonny Sharrock-esque spiritual jazz by the end of the tune. Viewfinder goes all over the place but never loses its direction. Throughout, Eisenberg defies the concept of following a single path, instead finding a way to arrange it all so deftly that every disparate sound and conflicting idea becomes a passenger on the same vessel. ~ Fred Thomas