Glenn Branca: This One Goes to Eleven

When I was thirteen years old, I was just beginning to learn the guitar. I was also a recent devotee to Metallica. I remember getting the tabs for “Master of Puppets” from Guitar magazine, and carefully placing my fingers on the proper frets and strings, as instructed: leave the low E open; first finger on the second string, seventh fret; third and fourth fingers on the ninth fret, fourth and fifth strings; let your palm mute the remaining strings. The result, I hadn’t yet understood, was a four-note chord, three of which are octaves of E.

I had my amp cranked, distortion on. I hit that chord for the very first time and it sent a shockwave through me. Power! I’d played a regular old E chord before, but it was nothing like this. Discovering the might of this octave-heavy power chord was akin to learning just what happens when you masturbate for the first time—sure, you’ve played the thing before, but it’s never done this. This is truly a moment that I think every guitar player can relate to: learning this particular chord for the first time. I think it’s positively Jungian. Hell, it’s even been captured on film—what chord do you think Michael J. Fox is playing at the beginning of Back to the Future? [okay, I just watched the clip, and in fact he doesn't play this chord, but in fact a totally weak A. Note to Bob Zemeckis: this scene could have been better.]

As I got older and my tastes grew away from metal and toward indie rock, I still found that octave chord, attacked at maxed-out volume, to be the epitome of power. It was embodied by the most brilliant band on the planet, Drive Like Jehu, who seemed to play nothing but octave chords. There’s something primal, unfuckwithable, about octaves. Especially loud ones.

Little did I know that Metallica, Marty McFly, and Jehu are mere monks compared to the Pope of the Ear-Shattering Octave, Glenn Branca. Last night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, as part of the Minimalist Jukebox series, Branca presented his Symphony no. 13, “Hallucination City,” for one hundred electric guitars. A hundred guitars. A guitar orchestra. A guitorchestra. It was brilliant. Breaking things down, actually there were eighty guitars and twenty basses, all tuned at octaves. Each guitar is strung with two pairs of three strings an octave apart, and the 100 guitars are further divided into either E, B, or G. Maybe I’m getting a little too nitty gritty here, but the point is that the octave is king—no, the octave is queen. The king is volume.

“Hallucination City” shifted between two levels: loud and impossibly louder. It was never—never—quiet. The first movement began with a steady, marching beat, as the harangue of guitar players furiously strummed at their instruments in polyrhythmic sound clusters, creating a massive swirl of noise. I’ve heard of a wall of sound, but the music here was so loud and so dense yet always moving, it was like an instrumental gas giant. The density of the layers created something that sounded almost like a vortex. As clusters of guitarists shifted their speed and volume, the sound seemed to move left to right, front to back across the stage, like an animal or spirit.

The second movement was fraught with tension. From the first few seconds the sound conjured a balloon expanding beyond its abilities, and as the volume and density increased the sound took on the form of a jetliner perpetually preparing to rise off the runway. Somehow, despite the fact that the piece started loud, the tension continued to rise and rise and rise. It was the defining element of the symphony—a parody-free embodiment of Nigel Tufnel’s claim in Spinal Tap: “most amps go to ten, but this one goes to eleven.”

By the fourth and final movement, I was overwhelmed and nearly exhausted. But hearing all one hundred guitars begin that last piece on the same note was like a second wind. Exhaustion became exhilaration. Octave is power! It was really the first time that the instruments sounded "musical," in the pedestrian sense of the word. Until now, a word like "melody" had no meaning, and even now it was only moments before the sound mass returned. Throughout "Hallucination City," the music erupting from the stage resembled anything but a song, or even the sound of a guitar; I heard airplanes, I heard shattering glass, I heard hurricanes whipping blaring fire engines into erupting volcanoes. As the fourth movement progressed, the note grew into a cacophony, then into an über-cacophony! Yet for all the volume, it was never so simple as noise. People in the concert hall were rising out of their seats. The din was both deafening and mesmerizing, traumatic and cathartic.

And then, it got still louder. Some of the guitarists literally couldn’t contain their inner Pete Townshends as they held their guitars aloft or stabbed down at their amplifiers. And like a magician pulling the cloth from a Thanksgiving table, the conductor made an abrupt signal and suddenly everything was hush. Everyone in the audience—and a couple of the guitarists on stage—bolted upright in applause. It was absolutely fantastic. Branca received a standing ovation. As we spilled out of the auditorium, you could see a certain thrill in everyone's step. "Hallucination City" was pure exhilaration.

Comments

[-K-]

This is a great review, much more knowledgeable about the music than I could manage.

If you don't mind, I'm advising anyone who reads my review to go to yours for a better musical explanation of "H.C." Let me know if this is a problem for you.

I like your site. Maybe I'll pick up "Apex of Hurt."

[pgwp]

K, thanks. I'll be sure to say hi to anyone who comes my way from the jimsonweed.