We are so insanely excited to be sharing the new double album Bloodletting (OOYH 012) by Wendy Eisenberg, which releases today. Wendy is truly one of our favorite musicians, and we are honored and thrilled to be helping them release this music into the world. We have incredible admiration and respect for all of the music they release (check out the forthcoming Bent Ring as well, now up for pre-order via Dear Life Records), and Bloodletting is a perfect addition to the OOYH catalogue. It is available as a double disc CD and digitally. Unfortunately CDs are a bit delayed due to production hiccups, but we'll be shipping them ASAP. As always, this incredible album art/design is by TJ Huff (huffart.com) and the CD edition of Bloodletting includes full liner notes about the piece by Wendy. Photo credit: Charmaine Lee.

"These are memory works, meaning the same pieces played on two different instruments, in slightly different modes and degrees of retention, so there's a compare/contrast at work, but also a way to experience muscle memory through Wendy's shadowy sense of space." --Lars Gotrich, NPR

Bloodletting (Liner Notes)
Wendy Eisenberg

Bloodletting was recorded March 22th, 2019 at Firehouse 12. I had written a massive document, also called Bloodletting, of text scores. Unlike directive text scores which indicate through order or poetry what should be played (or evoked), my scores were written blocks of pseudo-poetic texts which I then memorized and played from, aided by the randomness of memory. The purpose of this new form of text-score was to mimic, through memory and distance, the way the eye dances on a page, selecting what it does, when it does. This kind of reading, or recalling, affords the eye a bit of distance from the linearity that written language demands. I also wrote these scores because I was curious about why it was that text scores seemed to suggest, by abandoning notation, some kind of populism, when the simplest or most direct language seemed to me to be the most confusing. It also did not seem as though scores which told a person what to do, again via order or poetry, weren’t not still dictating behaviors; the hierarchy between composer and performer was still there, fluxing as always, not entirely subverted.

In light of that last notion, I want to keep these text scores private for just a while longer. I have begun some text scores of this nature for other musicians, but the nature of this particular suite is personal, in large part because the way memory works is personal. These pieces honor memory without reference. These scores comprise a long document, loosely organized into a sonata form. It would be hard for me to ask another musician to memorize the thousands of words I engaged with in the months prior to this performance. It would be harder still for me to predict how those words may resonate with them, and how they would try to play that. It would be like falling in love.

The movements are called:

Bloodletting
Ostara
Scherzo
Coda

I play through the suite twice, once on banjo and once on guitar. Weaved throughout the text scores is a prayer: may I let the instruments speak for themselves. (this is another reason why I will not reveal these texts). I wonder if the listener will perceive any commonalities.

A nice performance note: when I performed the first track, my finger started to bleed.

Wendy Eisenberg, May 2021

The piece was engineered by the team at Firehouse 12. It was mixed by Peter Atkinson and mastered by Simon Lancelot. Wendy Eisenberg plays the Gibson ES-175 and the tenor banjo.

Wendy Eisenberg - Bloodletting (OOYH 012) OUT NOW