03 James Whitman - Eisenstiens Bedroom (with lyrics by Barry Doupé) When I listen to Eisenstiens Bedroom I feel alive -- reborn even. Let me try to explain this feeling. I could swear that I've heard music in the chattering of birds (amongst the rustling of branches just past my bedroom window) even though I assume the birds (and the branches and the wind) could never intend such a thing. There's something about Eisenstiens Bedroom that reminds me of this. Beyond all else (and there has to be a lot else with Eisenstiens Bedroom -- just listen to it) I wonder if I'm hearing the result of countless bio-mechanical reflexes compounding over millennia and engulfing all suggestions of conscious intelligence. Eisenstiens Bedroom could serve as a kind of material evidence, or proof, for the old theoretical discrediting of still older and more persistent binaries (like nature and culture, the wild and civilized, the spontaneous and premeditated). Along with chattering birds and rustling branches, Eisenstiens Bedroom reminds me of countless art school parties, rediscovered field recordings, imaginings of what medieval nursery rhymes might be like, etc, but each of these associations is an uncanny one. They're not prescriptively illustrated or mimetically affirmed by Eisenstiens Bedroom. I’m not reading or interpreting what I'm listening to either, even though the singing and lyrics must surely be stating, naming, telling... Eisenstiens Bedroom defies abstraction despite itself. If true philosophy is constituted, as some have argued, by the creative generation of concepts for understanding, then perhaps Eisensteins Bedroom philosophizes despite this defiance. The inherent violence of representation (it's reification of lived experience, it's dependence on exclusion and negation to operate) is sublimated by a recurring and vitally collaborative act of conception -- existence as collaborative event. A common relation between Eisenstiens Bedroom and the listener is established (and continually renewed) by the mutual production of the other in use. Like all art I’ve found merit and pleasure in, Eisensteins Bedroom does not merely reveal, affirm, pontificate, describe or imitate. It changes all there is, was, or will be by existing, and this existence (like yours and mine) comes into being through an interactive engagement with what lies beyond itself. Every instance with Eisenstiens Bedroom is a revolutionary joy.