Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

After a life of horrible eyesight, dryness, infections, astigmatism, harsh blurs, migraines, expensive and heavy glasses, discomfort with the ocean, and other seemingly benign minor grievances, I caved and got Lasik in the fall of 2021. Finally able to see the world unmediated, everything about my relationship to tactility, immediacy, and perception changed. I could no longer blame the distance and otherness I feel in this world on the too-fallible panes of glass or plastic that delivered the visual world closer to me. I had to write myself into clarity about the closeness I now felt to the visual world, how disorienting clarity can be.

Writing this song cycle for improvisers was a process of meditation on the concepts of vision, the visible, signs, viewpoints, eyes themselves. Looking. That strange, faintly colonial relationship between seeing something and thinking you understand it, believing that you own it, in a way, because you can see it. I read John Berger and Jacqueline Rose and Jonathan Crary. I remembered that Spinoza was a lens grinder and considered how that informed the incredible vastness of his concept of God. I thought about how Wittgenstein went to the movies almost every day. I learned a wild fact about Bach, which is that he died of complications after being blinded by a botched eye surgery at the hands of a charlatan, the Chevalier John Taylor, who also blinded Handel. The threat of darkness, of blindness, loomed around the possibility of healing; entering the meditative field post-surgery was my relationship to risk. What do we risk for the sake of the improvement of our lives? What do we lose when we can see things clearly? What stays out of frame, and what does it mean to us to finally see it?

Tracklist:
1-1. Wendy Eisenberg – Lasik (05:47)
1-2. Wendy Eisenberg – Two Times Water (07:19)
1-3. Wendy Eisenberg – HM (06:20)
1-4. Wendy Eisenberg – Afterimage (22:16)
1-5. Wendy Eisenberg – Set A Course (12:26)
1-6. Wendy Eisenberg – If An Artist (07:32)
1-7. Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder (Intro) (04:21)
1-8. Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder (04:52)
1-9. Wendy Eisenberg – In The Pines (07:48)