NL premiere

Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, tenor banjo, computer, synthesizer, and the voice to create genre-spanning works: from jazz to noise to avant-rock to delicate folk. On their critically acclaimed album Viewfinder (2024), foggy free jazz, bossa nova, and indie guitar sounds coalesce. The album seeks to dissect the political dimension of seeing, viewing, and the gaze, and considers the relationships between disorientation, disrupted vision, and recovery processes. Eisenberg’s background as a writer leaks into their songs, whose freer elements of unbridled jazzy chaos are offset by a sensitive, writerly attention to detail and theme: “I read John Berger and Jacqueline Rose and Jonathan Crary,” they say of preparing Viewfinder. “I remembered that Spinoza was a lens grinder and considered how that informed the incredible vastness of his concept of God.” Unfurling as a synaesthetic, paradoxical epic of “sounds about vision,” upon the close of Eisenberg’s Viewfinder, one may discover a sense of fog being lifted through what the songs elicit: harmonious thoughtfulness and gleaming clarity, both of which will be heard when they perform with a band at Rewire.