Upset The Rhythm presents: Wendy Eisenberg + Tara Clerkin Trio

About

WENDY EISENBERG has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser, and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy’s self-titled new album (Joyful Noise) comprise their most certain vision yet. These songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts - where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory - and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half". Wendy Eisenberg is a New York-based songwriter, improviser, composer and guitarist whose work moves fluidly across avant-rock, free improvisation, noise, folk and song. Working with guitar, pedals, tenor banjo, synthesizer, computer and voice, Eisenberg has built a distinctive practice that combines technical precision with restless formal experimentation. Their solo catalogue includes Auto (2020), Bent Ring (2021), Viewfinder (2024) and the 2026 self-titled album Wendy Eisenberg , while their wider work spans collaborations and bands including Editrix and Squanderers. Alongside performance and recording, Eisenberg is also active as a composer and educator. TARA CLERKIN TRIO formed in Bristol (where none of them are from yet all of whom are deeply engrained) in 2020. Despite the singular authority implied by its name, they consist of the titular Tara Clerkin, her partner Sunny Joe Paradisos, and Sunny’s brother, Patrick Benjamin. With two extraordinary mini-albums – In Spring (2021) and On The Turning Ground (2023) – making a splash on London’s formidable World of Echo label in wake of their self-titled 2020 debut, this upcoming Somewhere Good LP (out now) is, in many ways, the band’s most realised work. In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic (*an overused adjective for which here there is regrettably no sufficient alternative) approaches, Clerkin & Co. color in and outside of compositional lines over the course of 40+ celebratory minutes - never wallowing, despite inherently somber subject matters of self-defeat, disease, displacement, restlessness, gentrification - allowing their arrangements and improvisations ample space and time to situate, stretch out, breathe, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take deeper hold on the listener’s imagination – all while somehow sounding more like themselves than ever before. There are elements of avant-pop, modern classical, kraut-folk, audio verité, and nods to trip hop, but Tara Clerkin Trio have fun transcending easy categorisation. https://taraclerkintrio.bandcamp.com/