When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected. “Finally able to see the world unmediated, everything about my relationship to tactility, immediacy, and perception changed,” as Eisenberg explains. “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.”
Coming this September via American Dreams, new album Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences. “Writing this song cycle for improvisers was a process of meditation on the concepts of vision, the visible, signs, viewpoints, eyes themselves,” as Wendy Eisenberg continues, and true to its exploratory form, the record pushes far deeper still. How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?
Artist and photographer Richard Lenz provides accompanying visuals for the record, from the cover art to the video for lead single and opener ‘Lasik’. The single and accompanying video are the perfect introduction to the record as a whole. As its title suggests, it’s a direct account of Eisenberg’s experience of laser eye surgery. Beginning with the procedure itself, during which the patient remains conscious throughout (“Stayed awake and watched my eyes grow stronger / watched everything get clearer” they sing) before moving on to the recovery process, from mundane details to philosophical wisdom picked up along the way (“Changing isn’t healing”).
Lenz’s video is at once abstract and very literal, exploring the album’s optical themes through the medium of light itself. “In [the] video I used lensless and pinhole photography techniques to explore how optics mediate our experience of reality in life and art,” Lenz explains. Check it out below:
Viewfinder is out on the 13th September via American Dreams and you can pre-order it from the Wendy Eisenberg Bandcamp page.
Photography and visual concept by Richard Lenz, album layout by Devin Shaffer