Kelly Kirwan
“Wendy has smelted these fine alloys for you; to build a skyscraper with a new kind of scaffold.”
The last line of Wendy Esienberg’s short bio is both a description and a riddle. She seems to balance on a polarity between the abstract and the pragmatic, referencing geometric lines, the neat collision of mathematics, and coyly teasing out an equation that we’ve yet to see (or understand) in full. And with that air of mystery, there’s intrigue. Enter Time Machine.
The cover of her ten-track, limited-edition cassette features a blueprint-style diagram of the so-captioned “Amazing and Beautiful Space Cube.” It’s a spot-on representation of her style and ambiance, a near-incomprehensible roadmap to bending space and time, laid out with a tidy arrangement of lines and vectors. Wendy Eisenberg layers experiments on top of experiments, and the result is mind-bending.
The eponymous track on her album doubles as its introduction, finishing just a second shy of a minute. Her voice is paper-thin, a wavering trill that seems on the cusp of cracking as she skims high octaves. "Time Machine" begins with a soft, sighing pitch, her lyrics delivered in misleading sentences. She tacks suffixes onto her words after pausing, changing the direction we were so sure she was headed. But Eisenberg sets us down a swerving path, always staying just ahead of the curve. “Even though the thoughtfulness has ended / I still pretend the years will stretch out long-er” she sings, her voice a nearly weightless murmur.
"Forty Words" opens with a sweet strumming, which feels like the lovechild of a folk song and a childhood lullaby. It’s as if Eisenberg is speaking her passing thoughts, and there's a certain intimacy to how she delivers each line. “Take a friend / Reinvent and resent / Resent who they come to be / You’ll walk when you try to run,” we hear in Eisenberg’s unique and delicate pitch, and as her words suggest, there’s something sadly reflective embedded in this song’s infrastructure.
Nest is "Oval," whose fuzzy synth has straight-up '80s pop vibes. Deft string work weaves in and out of these influences that feel, at times, like a nod to retro sci-fi or the neon-tinged ballads of three decades past. It’s a delightfully unexpected patchwork that shows Eisenberg’s willingness to turn the mismatched into something that makes sense.
Eisenberg may have a lo-fi aesthetic, but her music doesn't fade into the background. Her visions soar into the avant-garde within a bold, angular architecture. And we're enjoying the view.