The Free Jazz Collective
90
By Lee Rice Epstein
Wendy Eisenberg’s double album Bloodletting is a mind-bending trip, a marriage of form and function, a masterclass in artistic expression, and, well, to be plain about it, a stellar album. Eisenberg presents two performances of Bloodletting here, one on guitar and one on banjo. On the surface, their playing has a distinctly ad libitum quality—for example, durations don’t seem to be fixed or predetermined. Eisenberg has, on previous albums, used a mode of playing where they seem in conversation with themselves, and the memory directive of the score underlines this duality: the strings and fingers go where the mind, not the map, tell them.
The foundation of “Bloodletting” the composition is a block text score, which they memorized over months and perform through the randomness of recall. The set doesn’t include any excerpts from the text, nor do they expect to share it: “I want the memorized block of text to exist privately for me, ever altered by the process of memory the longer I hold on to it.“ For overly analytical listeners, this may be a stumbling block, but I assure you, everything you need is right there in the album. It is—in a way that superficially appears contrary to its design—an album that draws the listener within Eisenberg’s inner space.
With the playfulness of memory at the helm, there are signposts throughout the album of their conceptual framework, which, to these ears, shares some DNA with Cecil Taylor’s: the accretion of gestures and motifs represent the gradual shaping of Bloodletting’s four movements: “Bloodletting,” “Ostara,” Scherzo,” and “Coda.” By gestures, I’m intending this word to be read as the representation of an expression, not the technical performance of the expression. Let me briefly explain: their performances on both guitar and banjo highlight sets of notes and techniques that together form what I’m referring to as a gesture. The same sets might recur across multiple techniques, and vice versa. Compare the openings of “Ostara (Guitar)” and “Ostara (Banjo)” where similar melodic narratives play out across very different gestures, a chord hums in one where plucked strings buzz in the other. “Scherzo (Guitar)” is a deeply felt movement, patient and alluring. “Scherzo (Banjo)” matches expressly physical techniques with stretches up to 10 seconds long of space and ambient room sounds.
As Eliane Radigue wrote, “[H]ow, why does the experience of an impression become sound, music? An ordering is underway. Breaths caught in hollow tubes become tamed sound sources, hollow percussive objects become sources of rhythm, strings stretched over yet other hollow objects, through the stroke of a bow, turn into sound waves.” Taylor set a standard for this, with clusters centered around certain tonal groupings, in order to draw a narrative line through his compositions. Similarly, each Eisenberg gesture occurs and returns, restructures and recedes. And over time, musical motifs begin to suggest themselves, giving an aurally tactile shape to the invisible written score. Radigue—in a very different context, using very different instruments, with a very different intent—nevertheless explored similar ideas through her compositions. Consider Radigue, where something like stasis yet possesses subtle shifts, contra Taylor, where the subtlety requires excavation yet resides within the many notes. Eisenberg’s music resists a specific classification that would align her with either, instead they’re using tools of both to create a shimming union.
Memory is fickle, like blood being let it drips through in drops, swipes across in splotched lines. A stained bandage or piece of linen is something like a mind at recall: what was there and what remains contrast each other, a physical body leaves behind a fluid remainder, reminiscence triggers a tangible sensation. Bloodletting is like a Leonara Carrington painting or a Haruki Murakami novel, filled with companion associations that amplify and sometimes offset each other. Or take Radigue, again: “[T]here was a certain music that I wished to make. It was this particular music and no other.” Bloodletting is beautiful and dark, surreal and inviting, unexpected and delightful, and above all, it’s a Wendy Eisenberg album through and through.
Available on CD and digitally
Bloodletting by Wendy Eisenberg
Thu Mar 03 05:00:00 GMT 2022