GLENN BRANCA - Symphony No. 4 (Physics)

The recovery of Glenn Branca's missing Symphonies

The rediscovery of the fourth Symphony

It's been a full forty-three years since the performance of Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 4 (Physics), which took place in Zurich in May 1983. It had never been released since, and only the lucky few who witnessed it live could still recall anything of that experience. The original recording was believed lost, and there was little hope of ever hearing the symphony that immediately followed the celebrated "Gloria", recorded on January 16, 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
That changed thanks to the invaluable 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 shape, so Systems Neutralizers launched a fundraiser that brought in $4,449 from 90 backers — enough to attempt a restoration. Today, the fruit of that historic restoration stands as the only surviving document of the piece, one that still lets us feel the full power of Glenn Branca's orchestral sound.

The harmonic study

Symphony No. 4 marks the return of the 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 swell in volume and force as the minutes go by. The alternate guitar tunings, as ever, produce anomalous sounds you'd never hear in the work of a conventional guitarist, and that's one of the core reasons Branca's compositions remain so compelling. The harmonic sequences are strange, born of the studies of harmony that were one of Branca's obsessions: this is not simply rock pushed to its extreme or noise cranked up loud — behind the apparent chaos lies a deeply personal body of study.

The connection to the other Symphonies

Still, that alone doesn't account for the sheer apotheosis of the four movements' long finales, each the product of lengthy build-ups lasting several minutes that begin with simple suspended notes (as at the start of the first movement) delivered with an emphasis worthy of Richard Wagner (Branca's favorite composer), gathering energy minute after minute until they erupt into a primordial chaos of startling 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 a hypnotic quality — first through a slow pulsation repeated from the fourth minute onward, then through frequent shifts in the chord sequences, and finally with the customary addition of percussion.
The fourth movement, finally, 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 left a deep mark on the language of bands like Sonic Youth and Swans.

A godsend for every rock history buff

The recovery of this recording is a true godsend for every Glenn Branca devotee, and more broadly for anyone who cares about the true history of rock. "Symphony No. 4" thus becomes a precious archaeological document of that borderland where minimalism, no wave, contemporary composition and experimental rock end up blurring into one another, while the electric guitar definitively stops being merely a rock instrument and becomes pure sonic matter.
After all, according to Steve Albini, "Glenn Branca is one of the increasingly rare reasons not to kill yourself." Hard to argue with that.

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13/08/2026