Glenn Branca - The sound of a hundred guitars

When Glenn Branca first picked up an electric guitar he was just fifteen years old, and he surely couldn't have imagined how much he would change the history of the instrument in the decades to come. This long artistic and personal journey would earn him a reputation as one of the most controversial figures born out of the influences of the avant-garde, chiefly American minimalism, and the no wave and post-punk scene. As so often happens to those who present themselves as a hybrid of two worlds, Branca earned the reputation of being too classical for the rockers and too rock for the classicists, to the point of appearing as a foreign body in the history of both macro-genres.
Bringing electric guitars into the heart of the avant-garde can't have been simple, nor could bringing the avant-garde so brazenly into the world of the electric guitar have been easily accepted. The sonic universe recreated by Branca is essentially an offshoot of no wave and noise-rock, the field in which he had his first experiences as a musician, which merged with the repetitions of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and the walls of sound of La Monte Young: a warm fusion that, as it developed, broke down the rules of its original models until it bent them to the needs of the mature Branca. Into this already anomalous chimera, Branca had the courage to introduce the wholly classical concept of the symphony, taking a truly unprecedented step forward.

Branca reached the peaks of his poetics in his long compositions that slow down and accelerate, in his tragic guitar explosions, in his cathartic chaos that becomes the soundtrack to the author's inner torment, in his extreme noise that skirts the edge of a secular spirituality, conjuring vivid apocalyptic visions that start with The Ascension (1981) and run through the third movement of the first symphony, the percussiveness of the second, the mysticism of the third, the colossal adventure of the sixth, which develops the ideas of his early work, all the way to the unstoppable violence of symphonies 8, 10 and 13, concluding in 2019 with the third chapter of the ascension saga, The Third Ascension.
Retracing his whole path in full is therefore a way of exploring the hidden, and precisely for that reason particularly interesting, connection between rock and the avant-garde.

The early years: post-punk, no wave, the first bands and the first masterpiece

Born in 1948 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the teenage Branca later enrolled at York College and started playing in Crystal Ship, clearly inspired by the Doors, in 1967. It was a fleeting experience, not least because he loved theatre - which he also studied in Boston - more than music. He moved to London in 1973, then, back in Boston, met John Rehberger, and together they founded the Bastard Theatre. Together they wrote their first plays, "Anthropophagoi" and "Actually Happened", for which they also composed the music.
After moving to New York in 1976, he met the N. Dodo Band, and in particular Jeffrey Lohn, who convinced him to listen to Suicide. It was with Lohn that he formed his first musical project, officially kicking off his long and important career: Theoretical Girls, initially known as Static, a ghostly presence on the late-Seventies New York scene, with a handful of shows between the Big Apple and Paris and a single single, "U.S. Millie/You Got Me", released at the time, plus a much later compilation, Songs '77-'79 (1995), and a further, more complete compilation, "Theoretical Record" (2002). Lohn's partner, Margaret De Wys, played bass, and Mike Anthol, from N. Dodo, took the drum stool before being replaced by Wharton Tiers. These are experiences that matter mainly in hindsight, notable because they already contain some of the defining elements of the mature, legendary Branca.

In "Don't Let Me Stop You", for instance, the guitars are hammered so relentlessly, used as jittery rhythmic tools, that it's hard not to notice the link to the future no wave scene. The atonal, dissonant, or simply cacophonous elements, combined with serious volume, are all present here in just over five minutes of deafening rock. "My Relationship", slightly closer to post-punk, likewise features an innovative use of the guitar, poured like molten magma, vehemently, into the arrangement. Everything else is just scaffolding around the instrument's contortions, which climbs adventurously into a tornado of feverish noise. "Contrary Motion" is, again, an exploration of the guitar as a total, cacophonous instrument and absolute protagonist. The extremely powerful "theme tune" of "Theoretical Girls" anticipates both the goofy, hyperkinetic style of Butthole Surfers and the demented repetition of Devo.
Little else, though, is remembered from this period, partly due to often poor recording quality and compositions that, at times, feel more like improvised jokes than anything else. In hindsight, however, one can already glimpse, within the folds of these early career works, that drive to explore the territory on the border between rock and avant-garde music, understood as worlds in communication with one another. The explosive aesthetic, which uses sheer power to fill the sonic space and stun the senses, is the same one Branca would go on to use in the compositions of his maturity.

In the late Seventies, Branca convinced the owner of a club, Max's Kansas City, to let him perform as a soloist, in a venture separate from Static/Theoretical Girls. Branca put together a trio with Barbara Ess and Christine Hahn and played "Instrumental For Six Guitars": it marked the discovery of an unprecedented compositional space for multiple electric guitars, one he would inhabit for the rest of his life. This first experience was followed by others in venues closer to the avant-garde world, even though Branca was keen to be seen as a rock musician - which is also why he put the sound of the quintessential rock instrument at the centre of everything. It was precisely these early experiences, together with his acquaintance with Ed Bahlman of 99 Records, that would soon lead him to his first solo release.

After a brief stint recording the debut EP of Y Pants, a short-lived band belonging to New York's no wave scene, and a few shows with Rhys Chatham in his Guitar Trio, Glenn Branca seems to have fully defined the aesthetic he would cultivate for the rest of his career. Crowning this maturing of purpose, he founded a label, Neutral Records, and released not only Y Pants' album "Beat It Down", but soon after also the era-defining early works of Sonic Youth and Swans.
Meanwhile, the American composer was tenaciously searching for guitarists to add to his electric orchestra. Among them was a young man pushed to introduce himself by his girlfriend, Kim Gordon: it was Thurston Moore, a future member of Sonic Youth. Another guitarist from the band, Lee Ranaldo, took his place, but Moore would still be involved in one of the era's recordings, "Bad Smells".

In 1980 Branca finally arrived at his solo debut, Lesson No. 1 (1980), an EP made up of three tracks, the standout being "Lesson No. 1 For Electric Guitar", an early example of his guitar maximalism, here clearly related to the hypnotic minimalism of Steve Reich yet capable, halfway through the track, of anticipating noise-rock aesthetics and everything that followed from it, including a fair amount of alternative rock straddling the two millennia. This exercise, both intellectual and punk at once, carried forward through masterly use of crescendo, continues ideally into "Dissonance", a piece even freer in form but built around short rhythmic cells obsessively repeated with minimal tonal variation, and on the unshakeable will to use the guitar's percussive sound as an anxiety-inducing voice.

To these two compositions a third was added in the 1982 reissue, "Bad Smells", played by no fewer than five guitarists: Branca himself, Ned Sublette, David Rosenbloom, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. It's a piece that already has the colossal dimensions Branca is famous for, not just for its sixteen and a half minutes but also for the density of its sonic matter, with a skirmish of guitars overpowering a continually shifting rhythm, borrowing from the most chaotic improvisation and from Cage's timbral research. Across the reissue's generous 36-plus minutes, Lesson No. 1 is an extended, essential EP for observing the seed from which the masterpiece The Ascension, released in 1981, would spring.

The first masterpiece, the first ascension

The album is defined by its towering title track (thirteen minutes), which is, to all intents and purposes, the founding manifesto of Branca's ideas; starting from faint guitar hum, it builds steadily into a terrifying wall of sound that hovers somewhere between the apocalyptic and the mystical, between a kind of cosmic minimalism and an abyssal vortex of Lovecraftian terror, propelled by a drum rhythm of primordial violence. There is no comfort in the walls of sound on The Ascension, only ecstasy and disorientation, hypnosis and limitless power.
Branca saturates La Monte Young's "eternal" notes with energy, fills their empty spaces, and creates a new form of avant-garde.
"The Spectacular Commodity" (twelve minutes) is the most classic example of experiments with alternate tunings; the four guitars - each tuned differently - continually overlap until reaching an admirable new wave fugue that makes this track a true gem of 80s experimental rock. The very brief "Structure" is the most rigidly minimalist moment; a handful of guitar notes repeated and layered, with only the tempos dictated by the drums' fury changing; within it we find all of the composer's ideas distilled, repetition and extreme power. The eight minutes of "Light Field (In Consonance)" come across as more playful, yet still rigidly repetitive, while "Lesson No. 2" is initially tied to no wave and to the Theoretical Girls beginnings already recounted, before being shattered by deafening noise passages that foreshadow a good deal of the future Sonic Youth.

Coming directly after is Indeterminate Activity Of Resultant Masses (recorded in 1982, released in 2007), a long 31-minute composition later paired with an interview with John Cage that is anything but flattering towards Branca, and with an unreleased piece, "Harmonic Series Chord" (1989), unusually restrained in both rhythm and linearity.
The main course is a noisy monster that well represents the composer's choice to use guitars as vehicles for a suffocating torment, blurring the line between the percussive and the liturgical through an oblique, anarchic use of the instrument - also treated as a kind of cannon to be lined up alongside others like it, raising walls of sound that surround the listener and almost swallow them whole, as happens here in the final section.

Glenn Branca also took part in Chicago 82 - A Dip In The Lake (1983), a live recording of the New Musical Festival curated by Wim Mertens and dedicated to John Cage. It offers a chance to hear an excerpt from Branca's second symphony, placed within a line-up that includes Harold Budd, Peter Gordon, Charlemagne Palestine, Meredith Monk, Jon Gibson, Jill Kroesen, David Van Tieghem, Michael Byron, and John Cage himself in dialogue with Wim Mertens.
Although these releases represent an important part of Branca's artistic evolution, it is clear that the most phenomenal revolution was taking place on the front of his legendary symphonies. In this case, it is best to set aside the actual release dates, which often differ substantially from their composition or premiere dates, in order to better trace the composer's actual maturation over the years.

The iron symphonies

The symphonies are a central part of Branca's career, without which his entire discography would take on a different meaning. A body of research spanning nearly four decades, begun in 1981 with the first symphony and ending in 2015 with the sixteenth. For a closer look at the symphonies, see our special feature.
Branca's symphonies are the realm of guitars played with alternate tunings, of modified, hyper-amplified instruments, of volumes as deafening as no one had ever dared use before, of a technique that might horrify an instrumental purist, since it is secondary to the sonic impact the piece must have on the audience. It is precisely the devastating impact of the symphonies on the listener, literally assaulted by unimaginable volumes, that makes the live experience unforgettable.
A young conservatory musician, guitarist Gisbert Watty, recalls: "I remember attending one of Branca's symphonies in Dusseldorf, one of those packed with guitars where the decibels exceed those of a jet engine running. I didn't like it, but it was an experience that struck me deeply and made me think a great deal, so much so that I remember every detail of that evening perfectly". Composer John Adams tells us: "Earplugs weren't simply advisable, they were essential". Regardless of taste, the live experience of Branca's symphonies remains unforgettable.

The connection to classical music, which the word "symphony" might suggest, is minimal, at least in the symphonies for amplified guitars. It is therefore not possible to think of Branca as a rock composer moving towards classical music, as some exponents of progressive rock did. Branca remains firmly rooted in the world of avant-garde-influenced rock, partly in the way the Velvet Underground did, stretching post-punk sonorities to their limit to arrive at extremely long instrumental tracks, often beyond twenty minutes, effectively becoming a guiding father figure for various post-punk-noise bands (Swans, Sonic Youth) and for much of instrumental post-rock (Godspeed You! Black Emperor). His compositions could thus be described as post-punk (post-)minimalist symphonies.

Volume is a fundamental element, indeed the main means of communicating with the listener. Branca transforms minimalism, endowing it with a power it had never before even imagined having - in a word, he converts minimalism into maximalism. Even before setting out on his long series of symphonies, his debut The Ascension (1981) already showed crystal-clear ideas. From that point on, Branca's ambition would drive him to follow the path he had just begun all the way to the end.

The damning accusation of fascism that John Cage levelled after witnessing one of the symphonies - probably prompted by the almost military rhythm of certain movements - doesn't really hold up, even if the sheer imposing scale of the sound achieved might suggest a Nietzschean idea of music, at times even showing a closeness to certain worlds described by Wagner (Branca's favourite classical composer). The idea of an "army" of guitars must have been flickering in his mind for some time. From this came the long season of the symphonies, an ambitious project pursued with stubborn persistence, never compromising, in the conviction that in art the only thing that matters is daring more, always pushing further.

The symphonies can be divided into two types: the more innovative ones for guitar and amplified instruments, and the more traditional ones for symphony orchestra. To date there are sixteen symphonies, plus the lengthy ballet composition The World Upside Down (1992), which, although not formally included in the symphony series, effectively belongs to it.
Unfortunately not all the recordings are available, but all of the symphonies have been performed live. In particular, the non-amplified ones have been performed by prestigious orchestras, such as the London Sinfonietta, the Minnesota Opera Orchestra, the Graz Orchestra and the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra. It is likely that the symphonies never released will be made available posthumously in the coming years.

Other works, between theatre and new ascensions

In 1987 Branca collaborated with Wim Mertens on the soundtrack for “The Belly Of An Architect” (The Belly Of An Architect), the drama-grotesque film directed by Peter Greenaway. His pieces here are short, and among them the dramatic theme “Augustus” stands out for its suffocating grandeur.
Far more substantial is the aforementioned score written for the ballet The World Upside Down (1992), an acoustic symphony performed by the New York Chamber Sinfonia under Glen Cortese, structured much like his “official” symphonies. The shimmer of the first movement, made more dynamic in the second, is set against the thriller-like tension of the third movement, microtonal and chromatic, and the oppressive, clattering rhythm of the fourth, longer movement, where Branca proves himself a master of intensity. The expansive, more conventionally classical fifth movement, the cacophonous vertigo of the sixth, and the brighter closing anthem round off a non-symphony in which we hear a more chamber-like Branca — less deafening than when he deploys guitars en masse, but elegant in its harmonic and rhythmic nuances, meticulous in its melodic construction and layering.

In 1994 a minor Branca piece, “Les Honneurs Du Pied”, was included on the compilation “Century XXI: USA 2 – Electric / Acoustic”. Branca also appears on the no wave compilation “Just Another Asshole” (impossible to find in its 1981 edition, but reissued on CD in 1995), with a one-minute dada piece made up entirely of reverberated babbling.
In 2000 came the release of “Empty Blue”, a collaboration with performance artist Tony Oursler. More substantial was his contribution to the Bang On A Can project and the compilation “Renegade Heaven” (2000), which features the harrowing “Movement Within” (nearly 17 minutes): it's chamber music for the hell of the mind, a suffocating, disorienting torsion that annihilates the listener with substantial help from a suitably brutalized electric guitar.

After a cameo on the soundtrack to “The Mothman Prophecies” (2002, directed by Mark Pellington), Branca released nothing else until 2010, the year he returned to his first masterpiece to write The Ascension: The Sequel, an overwhelming blend of no wave, noise-rock and deafening maximalism.
These are pieces that reveal the composer's importance to a certain strand of loud, noisy rock: as if the master were determined to prove he could easily follow in the footsteps of his own disciples, as he does in the opening pair of tracks, while also knowing how to veer off into more elaborate forms of the guitar language he himself invented (“Quadratonic”), even taking the time for a tribute to Steve Reich (the ramshackle, then exhilarating “Lesson No. 3”).
The peak comes with the 19 minutes of “The Blood”, a torrential exploration of Branca's most noise-rock side, one of the genre's late masterpieces: amid the waves of sound and distortion, the whirling rhythms, the obsessive clatter, the composition radiates an almost mystical force, an overwhelming superhuman power, an almost unmanageable grandeur.

The end. The third and final ascension

The third installment too, The Third Ascension (2019, released posthumously), renews the magic. It continues the author's tireless ascent toward ever more unreachable heights for ordinary mortals, peaks where Branca finds those rare moments of happiness in a life lived largely with absolute pessimism, bordering on disgust, about the fate of the world and of humanity. The Third Ascension is an oppressive, dark, savage work, with a power that holds up entirely against his finest records. This third ascension contains several genuinely thrilling moments, ranging from devastating guitar onslaughts to pieces built meticulously piece by piece, with tunings studied and restudied to reach an absolutely astonishing final result.
The two longest compositions (“The Smoke” and “Cold Thing”, both sixteen minutes long) are two grand symphonic odysseys of rare violence, with “Cold Thing” standing out in particular, a mammoth, typically maximalist creation with machine-gun guitars and terrifying walls of sound, in line with the path set out across the thirteen minutes of the first ascension. Here it becomes abundantly clear just how much Branca was the guiding father of a long line of noise, post-punk and post-rock bands (Swans, Sonic Youth, Godspeed You! Black Emperor etc.), who owe a good part of their extraordinary careers to him.

Glenn Branca died prematurely on May 15, 2018, from throat cancer. He was 69 years old.

Forty-three years after the performance of Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 4 (Physics) in Zurich in May 1983, we finally get the chance to hear the symphony that immediately followed the celebrated “Gloria“, recorded on January 16, 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Credit goes to British archivist Will Prentice, who discovered a bootleg audience recording in his archive and handed it over to Reg Bloor, Branca's wife and founder of the record label Systems Neutralizers. The recording was in terrible condition, so Systems Neutralizers launched a fundraiser that brought in $4,449 from 90 backers, enough to attempt a restoration. The fruit of that historic restoration, Symphony No. 4 (Physics) (2026), is the only existing document of the work, and it still makes the power of Glenn Branca's orchestral sound tangible.
Symphony No. 4 marks the return of guitars after the experiments with modified harpsichords on the Third. Among the guitarists are Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore. In some ways it's the most minimalist of the symphonies, pared down to a handful of sonic elements that grow in volume and power as the minutes pass. The alternate guitar tunings certainly keep producing anomalous sounds never heard in the work of conventional guitarists, and this is one of the key reasons Branca's music remains so compelling. The harmonic sequences are strange, born of the studies on harmony that were one of Branca's obsessions: so this isn't simply rock pushed to extremes or noise cranked up loud — behind the apparent chaos lies a highly personal body of research. Still, that alone isn't enough to reach the apotheosis of the long finales of the four movements, the result of lengthy build-ups lasting several minutes, starting from simple suspended notes (the opening of the first movement) with an emphasis worthy of Richard Wagner (Branca's favorite composer), gradually absorbing energy minute by minute until they transform into a primordial chaos of unprecedented violence. The second movement sits somewhere between the aggression of certain tracks on “The Ascension” and the percussion of “Symphony No. 2“. The third movement runs to twenty-three minutes and, after a particularly static opening, takes on hypnotic qualities, first through a slow pulsation repeated from the fourth minute onward, then through frequent subsequent chord changes and, in the finale, with the usual addition of percussion. Finally, the fourth movement is an embryo of one of the movements of “Symphony No. 5”, especially violent, a magnificent offspring of the entire no wave culture Branca was steeped in, one that also profoundly shaped the language of bands like Sonic Youth and Swans.
“Symphony No. 4” thus becomes a precious archaeological document of that borderland where minimalism, no wave, contemporary composition and experimental rock end up blurring together, while the electric guitar definitively stops being merely a rock instrument and becomes pure sonic matter.

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