Wendy Eisenberg on Sight, Seeing & Seduction

Guitarist, improviser and vocalist Wendy Eisenberg has frequently come up in conversation as “the songwriter of our generation” amongst the heads in NYC (and likely elsewhere!). Their work is expansive, ranging from intimate songs to free jazz and hardcore skronk; performing both as a solo artist and member of bands like Editrix and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. On their upcoming release Viewfinder (out September 13th on American Dreams), Eisenberg puts together a collaborative dream team to produce a large-scale song cycle that formed out of newfound clarity – they received eye surgery to finally be able to see the world unmediated. We go long on experimental film/photography, what it means to seek out clarity, colonial perversions of seeing, and distorted self-perception in discussing the record.

Wendy Eisenberg (WE): Who’s that behind you? (Referencing Yaz’s Zoom background)

Yaz Lancaster (YL): Oh, it’s a beaver! (Laughter). I think my only other background options were Nathan Fielder in a giant suit or the bathroom from the first Saw movie, so this one felt the most normal for an interview. 

WE: …I really wanna know why these are the only three options, but I feel like the mystery is also incredible.

YL: Yeah…don’t worry about it. (Laughter). Where are you right now?

WE: Oh here – I can show you! (Un-blurs background). This is Mari and I’s studio. Mari knows you! Look at all those axes. (Gesturing to several guitars behind them).

YL: Hell yeah. It’s funny, I have a lot of friends who always ask me if I know you. It’s honestly incredible how I keep missing your shows whenever you’re playing in New York. I always have something come up extremely last minute, or I literally kept having shows at the same time this summer.

WE: That’s so normal. I feel like I’ve seen you on bills too. New York is so small somehow. There’s this thing where you know the distant figure of somebody else, but because of the demands of the city you just don’t see them as much. But you know that they’re real and they’re having this entirely separate vital existence than you are in the same place…Anyway, it’s great to finally meet you.

YL: Likewise! Let’s jump in. So Viewfinder is coming out pretty soon – How do you feel about it finally releasing? How long have you been working on it?

WE: I think I wrote the first major chunk of it three years ago so I’m kinda like “GET IT OUT!” I’ve written too much music since then. I’m so excited. I can’t wait for people to hear it.

YL: The impetus for the project was your experience getting Lasik eye surgery – that was also 2021? How’s your vision now – is it completely different?

WE: Yeah 2021. More or less – you wear glasses, they look amazing. You should enjoy that, I kind of miss them. Do you have really bad vision or is it more lowkey?

YL: I have astigmatism and eye floaters. I learned fairly recently that I have something called visual snow, which is like this TV film static over my field of vision. My whole life I was like “This is normal!” But my friend from Toronto was in LA getting treatment for months earlier this year with this specialist who focuses on floaters and visual snow, because I guess there’s varying degrees on how bad it is. His were affecting his way of life. I didn’t actually realize it was something that was really wrong with my vision – I think it’s one of those things that when it happens for so long your brain just gets used to it. Like that’s just how things are. So it’s not terrible in general, but the one brutal thing is my vision at night. It’s pretty horrific with the astigmatism and living in New York with all the lights everywhere. 

WE: Oh wow, I’m sorry. I had really similar things going on. I still have floaters. I think we understand each other.

YL: I don’t really wear my glasses that much to be honest. Maybe twice a week if I remember – I’m trying to be better about it. I’ve noticed my sight getting a little worse in the past year. Sometimes I see my glasses sitting somewhere in my apartment and think “Oh yeah, I could be seeing much clearer right now.” But I’m just so used to how I’ve been seeing the world.

WE: Wow, that’s so cool. When I had glasses it was just really bad. If I wasn’t wearing glasses or contacts I couldn’t see anything. Contacts kept giving me all these infections. It’s incredible the difference. If you’re rocking a huge prescription, your life is always mediated by a screen – and if you’re anything like me it’s a kinda dirty screen because I’m an absentminded person. Swimming was terrifying for me but now I love it because I’m not afraid that I won’t be able to see when I get out. All these small things…even being able to camp without worrying that I’m getting dirt in my eyes. It’s a gift. 

YL: It really is. Right now I’m looking at the artwork for the record – I love it. And the video for “Lasik.” Are you into photography or experimental film at all? Or did you just know that specific artist you collaborated with?

WE: Yeah, Richard Lenz and I worked together on the visual conception because I had a desire to represent the sense of what it literally looked like to get the surgery. When you get it you’re awake and there are lasers going into your eyes that create a visual effect, because you’re still getting visual stimuli while it’s happening. Even if you’re on drugs and you're numbed, you’re not feeling anything but you’re seeing these crazy distortions of the lens that is your eye. 

At the time of the surgery, Lenz and I were a couple. He is a great photographer, one of the best I’ve ever met. He had quit photography as an artistic career vocation even though he’s an extremely good artist. He was kind of lost in that way, and we would just talk about art – he’d tell me about all these photographers, which was incredible because I was so extremely focused on music – and literature to some degree. I had been completely blind to the world of visual art, so I learned a lot about experimental photography and photography in general from him. 

I became a huge fan of a filmmaker called Marie Menken, and another – the most famous structural filmmaker probably – Stan Brakhage. I had Covid at some point in 2021 and I was watching all their films that I could find on random download sites with a projector being like “What is that?!” (Laughter). It became this obsession because I kept thinking “What is unmediated visuality?” 

The idea was to represent something that very few people will either want to remember or even receive because Lasik’s hilarious and honestly a pretty 90s surgery to get. I wanted to share the beauty of the experience, and it required Lenz to conceive of the camera itself as the focus point for the processes. For most camera work you use a viewfinder to sharpen whatever you’re taking a picture of. So if you’re using a camera for that there’s some representational thing that the viewfinder is working in this outwardly-directed way. But the whole concept of the record and the visuals is the camera itself using the viewfinder internally. All of those blobby images that he created were actually within the camera, reflecting the light. 

YL: Wow. Yeah, earlier this year I had a commission project where they also wanted me to make a film. I was like okay, I’m not really a filmmaker but go off. Let me give it a go…

WE: That is so cool! Where was the commission? I’m so proud of you.

YL: Thanks! It was a double sextet piece for Thin Edge New Music and Ensemble Paramirabo in Toronto and Montreal respectively. They wanted a film or some sort of visual element, so I also spent a lot of time this year watching short experimental and avant garde films. With Brakhage especially I just kept going “This is crazy! How is he doing this?!” I also have two friends who have been making incredible expanded cinema work this year. I love my little point-and-shoot, but I don’t have a camera with video capabilities so I couldn’t do anything that cool with the project. 

WE: I mean, you could just see the world a little differently. But that’s so amazing. Getting back to the heart of that – doesn’t that make you feel like the first time you engaged with Pauline Oliveros or something? Like these things are so foundational to the way that we sense the broader tradition that they’re breaking away from.

YL: I feel like it’s something I don’t completely understand but I am so captivated and fascinated by. Like I sit there and watch these two, three minutes of magic and I’m just like, “How do people think of this?” It’s a whole other world of things to get really into and I wish I had more time to.

So you worked with Lenz, and there are a ton of other musician collaborators involved. Can you talk a little about the process of working with them?

WE: This piece came out of a commission and it was the first time I was able to have money to support a band that wasn’t a collaborative band. Everything I’d written prior to that had been with Editrix or Birthing Hips and both of those are democracies. In Editrix, musically I have the role of front-person, but we make decisions as one. It’s really annoying when people write about it as if that wasn’t the case. My solo thing has always been because people are like “Hey, I’ll pay you for the day!” but I can’t afford a band. This made it so that I could dream a little bigger and include the musicians I wanted. All of the musicians I chose to work with are fantastic improvisers, so they had a very true hand in the creation and generation of the music, but all of the situations that they helped to create were facilitated by scores I’d written, or prompts. A sort of thing where you write with people in mind. 

A lot of the people were people I hadn’t played with for a long time, or I was aware of them as artists but there hasn’t been an occasion for us to get together. That was certainly the case with Booker Stardrum, who I’ve been a fan of for a long time. Or Tyrone Allen and Andrew Links played in my senior recital – I’ve known them since 2012. It was a family affair with them. I knew Chris Williams and Zekereyya el-Magharbel from the free improv scene when I moved to New York. 

YL: What was the most difficult thing about putting the record together?

WE: The honest answer – these are really busy musicians. It taught me a lot. People would be late to rehearsals and I’d be like “Huh?” But I couldn’t say anything because I’m a people-pleaser. Just locking down the time for all of us to exist in the environments made me a way better composer because if I knew that we had less time to rehearse, then everything needed to be almost too clear. I would come in the first couple of rehearsals with messy charts and be like, “Whatever, these guys are geniuses.” I learned the hard way that everyone was going to be either late or hard to pinpoint, so I needed to have the clearest possible score and the most religious level of trust to get through recording without freaking out. 

YL: For sure. I think about that a lot. When I know that either we have like two rehearsals before the show, or it’s musicians that are playing in ten bands and have three other shows that week, it’s about making the score in a way that your ideas are there, but also attainable in the amount of time we have together. It’s actually really difficult to find that balance. 

WE: Yeah, especially trying to get a band sound. Strictly Missionary was my pod-era type band where we were playing twice a week, and that was my favorite situation because that’s the world I came out of where you have practice at least once a week and you write a song as often as you can. But the jazz/improvised/experimental composition world really doesn’t seem to work like that, especially not here. So it’s like, where’s the band sound?! It’s impossible to facilitate that. 

I think the second hardest part was waiting for it to come out. 

YL: I felt like that with my record last year. By the time it came out it was music I’d written or worked on like years before it dropped, so it was crazy to have to return to a much different version of myself and start performing those pieces live.

WE: My tendency for live shows is to play the last thing I wrote. Even while I’ve been playing solo shows leading up to this release – or just in life, nothing’s leading up to anything maybe – It’s so hard to go back in time because of what we do. With any composition we’re in a present or extremely recent mental state, so returning…yeah. It’s 2024, it’s been three years since I got the surgery and every time I talk about the record or people ask me how my vision is, I feel like I’m going to a follow-up appointment (Laughter). At this point when I’m not thinking about this record I’m just like, “I can see really well.” Which is a weirdly apt metaphor for how you develop your artistry record by record. When you play something from three years ago, it’s definitely really honest and that person exists within you, but it’s not stagnant. Of all the characters in my psyche they’re just the one from 2021. 

*Ironically, in a discussion revolving around sight and seeing, Wendy had to turn off their video due to poor internet connection. So we continued without me being able to look at them.*

YL: I guess to invert it, what was your favorite thing about working on Viewfinder?

WE: Getting to work on something large-scale felt really different. If the modality of creation I’m in is songs, most of the songs that I write are really short. They’ve gotten a little longer, but the material that I’m densely faithful to is between 2.5 and 4 minutes long. In this, I was able to really stretch out. When it was commissioned, the piece was meant to be evening-length. In my brain I was like, “You have this commission, just go wild. You have to write a suite like The Delta Sweete by Bobbie Gentry.” Being afforded the length grew me hardcore as a composer. I love long things. I have an expanded notion of time because I didn’t have to keep it concise. 

YL: Do you think you learned anything new about yourself when you were writing? 

WE: Every time I write a song I learn something about how I actually understand the world. Through these songs I learned a lot about my relationship to how sight and seeing can feel like ownership, and how weird that is for my experience of the world. Writing this and going as deep as I did about vision…Any discussion about vision seems to be as much about perception and perspective as it is about the fact that you’re always seeing an Other. I was learning, especially in a song like “In the Pines,” that a lot of people see something, and because they see it with their own narrative and perspective, they think that they own it because it’s separate from them. Or they think that they might want to, or might not be able to. 

I engaged with the idea as more of a coercive, or colonial principal. If you’re the first person from your universe to see a land, or if you’re seeing a land desperately that you need or think you need – there’s a marriage to the fact that you saw it first. It appeals to a very primal or primordial sense of justice. You see your sister receive candy, then your parents give you something else and you go “Wait a minute, it’s not fair this person got that and I didn’t.” I never thought about sight on that level, as a manifest of power. 

YL: Wow, yeah. I feel like I’m going to be thinking about that for the rest of the day. 

WE: I’ve been thinking about it with beauty too. This record’s all about seeing stuff, but it’s not about seeing something beautiful. It’s not about what you’re seeing at all. It’s about seeing outside yourself, but also the interior position of who is seeing. A lot of the best critical theory that’s come out in the past twenty… or seventy(?) years, has been about people who have been seen but haven’t been able to have a voice. Reclaiming the language of theory to articulate what it is to have been objectified. You can see the devastation of that. When I was writing this music I was reading a lot of (Éduoard) Glisssant and thinking about sight and ownership. Once you start thinking about that, looking at people is insane. But the beauty thing – I feel like there’s this way of beauty where people who are obviously beautiful have probably been looked at a whole lot, and the image has been worn as though you’ve been touching a photograph over and over again and it wears out the physical photograph. A conventional beauty is worn. Writing this wasn’t about that at all, but I was thinking about how If you see something for the first time, it can feel like it’s yours.

YL: This is amazing. Talking with you, I’m thinking about sight so differently. You know Joshua Minsoo Kim right? 

WE: Of course! I love that you’re hanging out with him, he’s such a crazy genius. 

YL: I met him in person this year and he has me thinking so differently – or just thinking at all – about smell, because of how he talks and thinks about perfume. My senses are going through it this year. I feel like I’m a baby again experiencing them for the first time. Or more so trying to actively engage with them.

WE: That’s good! I was a deep perfume-head when I was in high school which is so weird. I would get high and go to the mall and think about scent. When you think about smell you have to trust that something smells how it’s “supposed” to smell. You think something differently about a perfume based on what they tell you is in it. You have to fight against your own sight in a way because if something is supposed to smell like iris, you’re not looking at an iris and you’re smelling what is meant to be a representation of an iris. It’s so deep. 

YL: Insane! Being a baby frag-head is so fun.

I’m going to jump to something completely different – I wanted to talk about lyrics for a second. What was the first song that you wrote for the record?

WE: Probably “HM.” I wrote that in 2015 or 2016, and then salvaged and repurposed it for this. The rest of it was written between 2020-2021. “Afterimage” was written because I got another commission from Roulette Intermedium and I didn’t want to let this music go. I wanted to see what else it could do. 

One of my favorite artistic axioms comes from The Recognitions by William Gaddis – “How do you change a line without touching it?” The answer is partially context: putting a different sized line next to it. But if you’re dealing with that as a musical phenomena: what do you do when you just have a single line written out? It becomes a game piece when you put as little information as possible with how to interpret it. It’s cool to see how six years later how people were dealing with this material (from “HM”) that was really heavily indebted to Anthony Braxton and Frederic Rzewski. 

YL: Can you talk a little about the title track? I was super curious about a couple of lines in there: “Satisfied with poisoning my mind” and the “Threaten me” lines. “Threaten me by telling me how you see the way I’m living.”

WE: I can talk about it, but I want to know what grabbed you. What do you think it might be about? Sorry, is that shitty? (Laughter).

YL: (Laughing) That’s fair. I thought you might be talking about, like you mentioned earlier, how when people think of sight and seeing it’s often only thought of as a perception thing. How other people’s perceptions and ideas influence the way that you’re seeing things. 

WE: I felt alone in this feeling, but I don’t think I’m alone in it. The feeling that there’s some imaginary other that’s really good at things and knows what to do at any given moment. That’s the person who’s judging me in any given situation. They see me doing well, or poorly, and all of those qualifying words are incredibly specific to my imagination of them as an Other. This song was written more or less about a fight I was having with a friend at the time. I could tell that he was seeing me as this oversensitive, I-make-people-walk-on-eggshells-around-me type of person – which is not how I see myself. Pretty much the direct opposite of that. I was having this ricocheting mirror effect where I was like “If I see myself this way, and this person is seeing me that way, how much of each of those viewpoints are distortions of each other and the way we see ourselves?” If I look at the first verse, it’s me trying to have actively killed this view of me that hates myself enough to make other people really nervous around me. I really don’t think I’m like that. It’s a really pained song. 

Why does it hurt so bad when someone’s telling me how I’m actually living? Is it actually because any view of me from the outside is a distortion? And that distortion makes me feel like I have to measure up to something external to myself that I didn’t choose, but someone’s putting that judgment on me? All these rich psychoanalytic questions were coming up. Right now I’m looking at an apartment building across from me, and I can squint and hold on to one of the balconies with my fingers, which is incredibly stupid of a thing to think is real. Like, “That looks really small because it’s fitting into the frame of my eye.” But when you’re over there you can literally stand on it – that’s everything you have to know about how people see you versus what might actually be happening. Things are made smaller, they’re reversed, they’re malleable in the conceptual realm that someone else has to live. Someone else has to stand on it. 

YL: I was literally just talking to someone about this. It was a few weeks ago in Philly – my friend and I are a part of this music writers cohort through the Asian Arts Initiative called Sound Type. Joshua is actually involved with that too, and the three of us were staying in the same hotel and we stayed up yapping until like 5 in the morning. Anyway, my friend was talking about how much they fear that they’re saying or doing the “wrong” thing to make people think of them in a way they don’t see themself. 

WE: Whoa, whoa, wait. Say that again. This sounds so interesting.

YL: They were going to meet someone they see as a potential mentor figure to talk about their artistic career and the trajectory of where their life is going. But they were anxious about it because they didn’t want to say something that would lead this person to see them “incorrectly.” 

WE: Uh oh. Isn’t it almost as confusing as when people talk about music? It’s the same level of weird translation that’s not complete. 

YL: I just think it’s funny to think that you can be yourself “wrong.” Or there’s like a correct and incorrect way of being who you are in specific moments that leads other people to not understand any other versions of yourself that manifest at different times.

WE: It’s the hardest thing. Sometimes there are these different personae that we have to keep track of for different friend groups or people. It’s not even intentional that we act a different way around them. It’s just a raw fact that we act differently with different people because they’re different and it brings out different parts of us. But then you have to be beholden to that version of you for as long as you know that person – unless they’re comfortable with you changing, which an astonishing amount of people are not comfortable with.

YL: Yeah I’ve been thinking about change a lot recently. I guess because it’s August and I feel like the end of August is always crazy for everyone. On that note, the line “Changing isn’t healing” (from “Lasik”) is incredible. I’m obsessed. I want to get it tattooed. 

WE: (Laughing) STOP! That would be INSANE. That’s so cool, you’re a genius. It’s such a galling truth isn’t it? You’d be the only one in the world who has that. 

YL: I’m serious, everyone’s going to get “Changing isn’t healing” tattoos when the record drops. 

Your liner notes are also written so beautifully. There’s something in there I wanted to ask you about. You wrote “What do we lose when we can see things clearly?” Do you think you were able to answer that in the process of creating Viewfinder? Or now after it’s been completed?

WE: God, what an amazing question, to give somebody their own rhetorical question back. (Laughter). I teach music theory and other courses at The New School, and because I’ve had the privilege to be in an educational space on that level, I’ve had to deal with the part of me that actually prefers when I transcribe things wrong. There will be a moment in learning a song where my misunderstanding of whatever I’m trying to transcribe is more interesting than the transcription itself. Maybe I play something totally wrong and I’m like “Holy shit, this is so cool.” Then I have two choices – do I resist that conceptual distorted urge to go in one direction and stay on the extremely straight-and-narrow path of trying to be as precise as possible; or do I get seduced and open this door. 

In answering that question of what we lose. There’s an element of knowing what you want that can turn you into a tyrant. A tyrant is someone who cannot give up. They keep clinging onto their thing. That’s also who a tragic hero is, somebody who can’t stop pursuing something specific even though it might be hurting them badly. When you’re pursuing something like clarity you’re doomed because you have a perspective. The things that you lose are the things you don’t know that you might want. That question is just a generative question for life. If you’re searching for clarity you’re searching for some level of fixity that has potential to turn you into a tyrant – or the potential to focus your life. 

That’s all I think about now. 

YL: I feel like that’s all I’m going to think about now too. 

WE: I wish that we could find some type of way to tattoo part of that together so we can be bonded in it. Like a snake eating someone else’s tail. That would be amazing. 

Wendy Eisenberg’s Viewfinder is out everywhere on September 13th via American Dreams. For more information about Eisenberg, visit their website or subscribe to their substack. 

Related listening + reading:

• Wendy Eisenberg & Caroline Davis – Accept When
• Jessica Ackerly – All Of the Colours Are Singing
• Joni Mitchell – Hejira
• John Berger – Ways of Seeing