He has always been a
musician positioned halfway between the role of avant-garde composer and that
of the rock musician. As a Student and disciple of the masters of American
minimalism, such as Mount Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich,
has always had to fight against prejudices and fierce criticisms. His position
was uncomfortable and surely, too academic for rock enthusiasts and too
"politically incorrect" for academics.
Returning from a
theatrical experience in Boston, where he studied acting, Glenn Branca has been
moving since 1976 to New York's avant-garde environments, notably the Kitchen
of Rhys Chatham. In that context, Branca is part of the trio of guitars of Chatham,
founded the punk group of Theoretical Girls with Jeff Lohn, whose material will
be collected on 1978-1981 (Acute, 2002), sounds with the Daily Life of Barbara
Esse, e In 1980 he formed the Static, a complex female rhythmic section
(Barbara Ess on drums), with which he recorded the 45 laps My Relationship.
Their material will be collected on the EP Static (Theoretical, 1984).
The same year, he
published the EP Lesson n.1 (99Records, 1980 - Acute, 2004). The dissonance
composition, twelve minutes of hammering paranoia of hollow guitars and
keyboards, hallucinated suspense, of incandescent rhythms, and Lesson n.1,
enthralling minimalist growth in which the instruments (two guitars, bass,
organ, and battery) enter regular intervals by repeating the same sentence to
infinity. They are two stunning songs that contain the subsequent developments
of Branca's work in embryo. The guitarist invented chamber music for rock
instruments only, in which all that produces sound is traced back to the most
primitive percussive.
The new Branca sextet,
who reappears only the drummer Wischert, has an ASCENSION recorded (99Records,
1981 - Acute, 2003).
The Branca laboratory,
combining and recombining the sound of guitars, has managed to synthesize a
disturbing form of monolithic, immense, and immanent minimalism capable of
touching mystical leaders.
Branca is the composer
who introduced massive doses of noise and rhythm in the format of the classical
symphony. Even if the dynamic has always played a specific role in its results,
the bombastic, anguished, tormented explosiveness of guitars and percussion
entirely made his works' emotional content.
Branca also made some
soundtracks, such as the one for the film The Belly of An Architect (1986).
The first branch symphony
is orchestrated for guitars, keyboards, brass, and percussion (played by
characters such as Barbara Esse, Lee Renaldo, Ned Sublette, and Stephen
Wischert). After the almost-graceful hum of the beginning, the first movement
takes on more Fanfareschi and ethnic above the multitude of tools and for the
battery-grinding attitude, but still qualifies as the music of transcendent
progressions. If anything, the counterpoints and interference (always in
consonance) give its orgasms a more tribal and less cerebral character.
As usual, there is no
leitmotif, but only a tragic crescendo of resonances, superities, echoes,
thuds, clages. The symphony opens with an obsessive multilateral hum in
"Mi," followed by fanfares conciliate of wind and a catastrophic,
devastating, and deafening growing choral.
This defined the
mystical, comic, and tragic tones of the work. The second explicit movement is
the influence of the minimalist archetypal music of Java, the gamelan, whose
traditional instruments imitated the sound with appropriate "steel"
stamps of the guitars (beyond Bell and dishes): all the tools obsessively beat
as in a grotesque tribal ritual, and the emphasis grows in an increasingly
childish way.
The third movement
returns to the threatening epic of the Maelstrom on the rope of "Mi,"
in which Branca loves to dive into traces with all the arsenal of dissonances:
the thirteenth subjugation of guitars grows in an intermittent narrowness of
winding (swallowing in ambulance Inside a trumpet), the tornado moves and takes
strength under the battery showers. This movement is the most violent and
apocalyptic branch conceived.
The ending recalls the
start of a car with a semi-scaring battery: repeated junctions, syncopes,
pauses. Finally, the mechanism puts itself in a way, blowing and lapping. The
metal sound of the guitars totally degenerates here. The rhythm comes without logic,
from the high frequencies of the hypnosis to the chilling relaxation of
anguish, and the landscape is populated with presses, gears, and sliding
ribbons ...
