Wendy Eisenberg – Its Shape Is Your Touch

What our staff has to say: “A narrative journey of avant garde blues guitar. I am a huge fan of solo guitar music, and this is top tier.” – Alex

Wendy Eisenberg is an extraordinary guitarist dedicated to the completely unconstrained exploration of music, language and time. Her work has taken her from conservatory to DIY space to concert hall, from performing improvised music and punk-metal to writing the quietest of songs. On Its Shape is Your Touch, Eisenberg turns her gaze to the guitar in its most absolute, essential form. Having traversed musical genres as she has, the intricate improvisations she weaves on this record have as much to do with the vast history and musical conventions that she chooses to leave out as the sounds she chooses to play. In the process Eisenberg invents a vibrant, fiercely unique language all her own. The artist in her own words: The title Its Shape is Your Touch, from the final line the Richard Brautigan poem ‘Here is something beautiful,’ is one-half of the thesis of this record. The other, the absent antithesis, comes from the William Gaddis novel The Recognitions: ‘you can change a line without touching it.’ The shape of the guitar is the context for the sounds it makes; your touch activates this machine, alters, creates and transforms its possibilities. The shape is created and outlined by the touch, but it contains absence, undefined space. In my music, the lines change with and without physical touch: my touch creates the sound, but those sounds expand, contract, rotate, and dance as I re-establish and constantly evolve the contexts and boundaries of this world. This record has to do with absence, the spaces and movements implied by the lines of a sketch and the other worlds that choice of representation chooses to ignore. I want to let linearity be not a crutch but a device for intelligent travel through musical space. I like to think of these recordings as a gentle exorcism. Recorded in a year of significant, deep loss, it is hard for me not to hear this record as a kind of metamorphosis, a blood-letting, a culling and casting of musical and personal values. This music is reflection on loss and implication: a bluessless blues.