Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard by Roni Sarig Page A
Authors: Roni Sarig
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Deuys switching off on bass and keyboards, and drummer Wharton Tiers (who would later become Sonic Youth’s producer). With their jagged guitar noise, Theoretical Girls fell in with the no wave scene of bands like DNA and Lydia Lunch ’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
After releasing one single, U.S. Millie , Branca formed a second band, the Static, to pursue his own musical ideas exclusively. The trio featured Barbara Ess, a visual artist and Branca’s longtime girlfriend, and drummer Christine Hahn (who later played in CKM with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). In Static songs like Inspirez Expirez , his first extended instrumental, and The Spectacular Commodity , featuring a dense cluster of E notes, Branca began to explore more conceptual music.
At Max’s in 1979, Branca presented Instrumental with Six Guitars , his first work as a composer. Featuring 12 minutes of minor intervals layered over each other to create a dense wall of noise, the repetitious music was clearly influenced by minimalism, though the guitar roar was all rock. Branca realized that working as a composer rather than in a rock band was a better way to express his highly dramatic themes. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Branca decided to call his extended sonic explorations “symphonies.”
But while Branca made a conceptual leap into the world of art music, his material retained most of its rock roots. To maintain rhythm, Branca used a drummer and bassist, and to bolster the sound density he recruited a “guitar army” of up to a dozen musicians. Among the earliest members of his group was future Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (his bandmate Thurston Moore would soon follow). A bit later, Page Hamilton of Helmet joined the ensemble. Branca retained a theatrical element in his music by conducting in a very physical, dramatic style – writhing on the floor and flailing his arms madly – which he believed evoked better responses from the musicians.
David Byrne:
I thought Branca’s guitar orchestra performances were amazing. Very powerful and thrilling. It wasn’t as loud as people said, it was more the immensity of the sound than the volume. At some point I tried to get elements of that kind of sound into what I was doing, though I wasn’t very successful.
Tuning individual guitars to a single note, Branca created intervals and chords by using a number of differently tuned guitars – 11 in all for Symphony No. 1 . It’s easy to imagine the horror with which Branca, accompanied by performance artist Z’ev’s industrial percussion, was greeted in classical music circles. Branca, however, offered more than just exercises in how to clear a room. While exploring the possibilities of guitar tunings and layering at extreme volumes, Branca began to hear phantom tones within the sheets of sound. He discovered that the guitars could produce natural effects that sounded like horns or choirs.
Page Hamilton, Helmet:
Symphony Number 6 was a real sonic distorted guitar thing. Double strumming brought out different harmonics in the instruments. Live you hear all those guitars and all those harmonics popping out and it sounds sometimes like trumpet and also like voices. You definitely hear choirs. Being on stage with that is unreal.
In the early ‘80s, Branca began to investigate acoustic phenomena and focused on the harmonic series, the string of notes (the root and overtones) that make up each musical tone. He began writing microtonal music, which uses tones that fall between the notes in the traditional 12-tone system. “People talk about the music of the 21 st century. Well, this is it,” Branca says. “It’s going to be micro-tonal music, without a doubt.” To accentuate the acoustic traits of microtones, Branca needed to create new instruments such as a mallet-struck guitar (for better resonance) and electric harpsichord (essentially guitars made into keyboards), as well as guitars refretted to play the harmonic series.
Branca became so
After releasing one single, U.S. Millie , Branca formed a second band, the Static, to pursue his own musical ideas exclusively. The trio featured Barbara Ess, a visual artist and Branca’s longtime girlfriend, and drummer Christine Hahn (who later played in CKM with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). In Static songs like Inspirez Expirez , his first extended instrumental, and The Spectacular Commodity , featuring a dense cluster of E notes, Branca began to explore more conceptual music.
At Max’s in 1979, Branca presented Instrumental with Six Guitars , his first work as a composer. Featuring 12 minutes of minor intervals layered over each other to create a dense wall of noise, the repetitious music was clearly influenced by minimalism, though the guitar roar was all rock. Branca realized that working as a composer rather than in a rock band was a better way to express his highly dramatic themes. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Branca decided to call his extended sonic explorations “symphonies.”
But while Branca made a conceptual leap into the world of art music, his material retained most of its rock roots. To maintain rhythm, Branca used a drummer and bassist, and to bolster the sound density he recruited a “guitar army” of up to a dozen musicians. Among the earliest members of his group was future Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (his bandmate Thurston Moore would soon follow). A bit later, Page Hamilton of Helmet joined the ensemble. Branca retained a theatrical element in his music by conducting in a very physical, dramatic style – writhing on the floor and flailing his arms madly – which he believed evoked better responses from the musicians.
David Byrne:
I thought Branca’s guitar orchestra performances were amazing. Very powerful and thrilling. It wasn’t as loud as people said, it was more the immensity of the sound than the volume. At some point I tried to get elements of that kind of sound into what I was doing, though I wasn’t very successful.
Tuning individual guitars to a single note, Branca created intervals and chords by using a number of differently tuned guitars – 11 in all for Symphony No. 1 . It’s easy to imagine the horror with which Branca, accompanied by performance artist Z’ev’s industrial percussion, was greeted in classical music circles. Branca, however, offered more than just exercises in how to clear a room. While exploring the possibilities of guitar tunings and layering at extreme volumes, Branca began to hear phantom tones within the sheets of sound. He discovered that the guitars could produce natural effects that sounded like horns or choirs.
Page Hamilton, Helmet:
Symphony Number 6 was a real sonic distorted guitar thing. Double strumming brought out different harmonics in the instruments. Live you hear all those guitars and all those harmonics popping out and it sounds sometimes like trumpet and also like voices. You definitely hear choirs. Being on stage with that is unreal.
In the early ‘80s, Branca began to investigate acoustic phenomena and focused on the harmonic series, the string of notes (the root and overtones) that make up each musical tone. He began writing microtonal music, which uses tones that fall between the notes in the traditional 12-tone system. “People talk about the music of the 21 st century. Well, this is it,” Branca says. “It’s going to be micro-tonal music, without a doubt.” To accentuate the acoustic traits of microtones, Branca needed to create new instruments such as a mallet-struck guitar (for better resonance) and electric harpsichord (essentially guitars made into keyboards), as well as guitars refretted to play the harmonic series.
Branca became so
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