Balancing careful precision and wild invention, Wendy Eisenberg has always challenged the line between the organic and automatic. Both creative freedom and mechanical pattern are fundamental to their music, and the resulting songs exist in a sense of ambiguity. One could view them as human attempts to achieve machine-like proficiency, or machines themselves haunted by some intangible human core. What emerges is a struggle, a kind of never-ending dance, the organic and synthetic fighting for control, yet always tempted by one another’s charms.
Auto, the latest Wendy Eisenberg album on out on Ba Da Bing Records, feels like a most direct acknowledgement of this tussle. Eisenberg gives a variety of explanations for the title, from automobile (“A lot of these songs were written about and mentally take place when I’m in the car on my way to gigs,”) to autofiction (“the semi-fictionalized presentation of the self in a narrative form of growth,”), yet the most striking is automaton. “I make myself into a machine,” they explain, “which is why everything that’s played is precise.” But this comes with its own irony, for Auto is also an intensely human record. A confrontation of loss, trauma, pain and healing—phenomena completely outside of the experience of machines.
Wendy Eisenberg utilises this tension, repurposing the inherent contradictions between the human and the mechanical to bypass the flaws in each form. The songs work through a series of traumatic events with daring honesty. From abuse in adolescence and the resulting PTSD to the unrest and unhappiness that led to the disintegration of a former band, Eisenberg pushes into the most uncomfortable crevices of their past, emerging not only with a pained view of what has been but also glimpses of what has been denied and taken away.
But Eisenberg complicates this clear-eyed telling, acknowledging the limited view one person’s version of events can offer. Childhood friend Nick Zanca provides electronics and production on Auto, and this digital framework proves vital to the ambitions of the album. The electronic sounds function “like commentary on songs that were written from an organic or subjective perspective,” Eisenberg explains, the synthetic layer suggesting an objectivity of mechanization which “outweigh[s] the subjectivity of normal singer-songwriter guitar songs.”
On occasion, this almost mechanical sensibility extends to Eisenberg themselves. Take ‘Centreville,’ a frantically inventive track which confronts a past abuser head on. “The song literally forces me to alienate my body from my singing self,” they explain. “The complexity of the guitar part is exercise enough for me to have to almost ignore my body.” The result grounds the distinction between flesh and bone mechanics and the diffuse self of thoughts and feelings, but also highlights how both are intrinsically linked.
Auto is out now via Ba Da Bing Records and you can get it from the Wendy Eisenberg Bandcamp page.
