Glenn Branca Ensemble champions electric guitar

Glenn Branca Ensemble at Frieze Art Fair 2007 (photo: Xander Karskens)

Glenn Branca: Hallucination City
The Roundhouse, London, 12 October 2007

100 electric guitar players (well, 80 guitarists and 20 bass players) and one steady, unfazed drummer: the line-up for Glenn Branca’s ‘Symphony No.13: Hallucination City’, which took place in London as this year’s ‘Frieze Art Fair’s side music event.

Much lauded for his minimal-yet-loud celebrations of guitar dissonance, and one of the key figures in the early 80s downtown New York avantgarde scene (heavily influencing more profiled acts like Sonic Youth), Branca’s uncompromising experimentations have reached an all-enveloping climax in this epic composition.

Hallucination City was originally conceived as a 2000-guitar performance, commissioned by the city of Paris for its millennium festivities. Unable to work the logistics for a scale that ambitious, Branca eventually settled for a 100-piece guitar orchestra, consisting of volunteer guitarists recruited in the city where the concert is to take place.

The London version of Hallucination City (which was first performed in June 2001, at the base of the World Trade Center in New York) was slow-moving, loud, and dramatic, with short breaks in between each of the four movements of the composition. Defying the logic of traditional symphony scoring, the piece opens immediately with a violently big roar, to gradually shift in tone and structure but rarely relenting the dull heaviness of its sonic body.

Throughout the 70 minute piece, Branca effectively uses subtle yet haunting climbing chromatic scales, woven into a larger tonal fabric of big dissonant chords. Particularly impressive in Hallucination City is the way specific guitar parts are scored to sound like entirely different instruments: where wailing guitar solos (absent in Branca’s layered-guitar-parts approach) in rock music sometimes sound like lyrical exercises, certain passages resembled brass sections, or choir voices.

The final movement is the most dynamic, using almost-silences and thundering crescendos to reach an ecstatic climax – slowly merging with a long, ovational applause from the crowd. An impressive, remarkable feat, Hallucination City champions the electric guitar as a symphony instrument: aggressive but emphatically versatile.

Homepage of Glenn Branca

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