Yes, that’s 100-ish guitars and one Knicks jersey (photo me)
Can you listen to ear torturer/noise master Glenn Branca’s auditory assault “Symphony no. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars” without macabrely dwelling on the horrors of 9/11 and, well, everything that came after?
I know I couldn’t when attending the experimental symphony on a whim last Friday at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. The concert, marking the first performance of the composition since Branca’s death in 2018, was part of their Summer of the City program, which meant it only cost $5 for the 70-minute-long plunge into a cataclysmic sea of sound, produced by, as billed, 100 guitars…or really, 80-ish guitars, 20-ish bass guitars, and one of the best drummers I’ve ever encountered Greg Fox. Yes, I’m aware of the unintentional hilarity of Branca’s physically punishing, sonically taxing musical composition that made me ruminate about terror and mass death being billed as part of Lincoln Center’s fun summertime activities, alongside the plucky queer line-dancing hosted by Stud Country amusingly occurring right outside.
Part of my admittedly ghoulish reflection on September 11 and its aftermath relates to the spookiness surrounding the original performance of “Hallucination City” held at the World Trade Center on June 13, 2001, just months before the attacks. A queasy and ominous video of the initial performance filmed by attendee Peter Shapiro can be found on YouTube. At first, Shapiro films the 100-ish (it’s always give or take, depending on who has a cold and who gets cold feet) volunteer guitarists on a makeshift stage. Then, realizing just staring at 100 furiously strumming guitarists isn’t all that visually compelling, Shapiro switches to dizzily capturing the looming towers, shaking the camera as if they’re withstanding an earthquake. Even Branca himself was freaked out by this footage, telling New York Magazine, it was “a little unsettling.” “It’s like, what did he know?” he dryly quips.
In that same interview, Branca grumpily dismisses there being any significance to the World Trade Center as a location, which wasn’t the intended spot for his foray into jam-packed three-figure electric guitar maximalism. The French government wanted Branca to compose a piece for a staggering 2,000 guitars to celebrate the turn of the millennium, a Y2K task that seems like a muddy, terrible idea. Branca knew it too, but took the commission nonetheless. When it fell through, he ended up picking up the notion for guitar excess with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Even still, “Hallucination City” is inextricably tied to its launch during the “summer of threat” as the 9/11 Commission Report describes it. Not that what was performed on Friday was the same symphony from 2001, either. After that first 2001 performance, Branca scrapped the piece and rewrote it years later. Watching Shapiro’s footage, one major change concerns the drum performance, which switched from a jaunty, almost Latin beat to a thunderous metal tour de force that barrels toward the militaristic.
However, it’s not just this unnerving backstory, which earned a few gasps from Friday night’s audience when explained by presenter Adam Shore. The symphony approximates the feeling of being trapped in or sucked into a jet. Hell, one of the attendees of the 2001 concert termed it “Symphony for a Jet Engine.” Yeesh. This jet-engine-ness comes from the sheer volume, both of the amount of instruments (and their many varieties of amplifiers) onstage and the astronomical decibels. Before the performance, Shore warned that it would be loud and helpfully encouraged audience members to grab the earplugs provided in the lobby. As soon as the symphony began with the first movement, “March,” which opens with a relatively muted start given the immense dissonance to come, audience members leapt from their seats and ran down the aisles, desperately seeking those aforementioned plugs. A stubborn few stayed and plugged their ears with their fingers before shuffling out to the lobby. Luckily, I came prepared. But even I didn’t quite anticipate the sheer physical experience once the swarming overtone mass fully attacked. A wave of discordant electric clamor that made my nerve endings vibrate, with Fox’s drums beating in my chest.
It’s hard to describe the tone of the symphony other than to say it’s Branca. Nothing really sounds like his singular atonal guitars, other than his acolytes like Sonic Youth and Swans (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Michael Gira all were at one time in Branca’s ensemble, and it shows). While “Hallucination City” maintains this characteristic no wave-derived tone (Branca was also part of the no wave scene in bands like Theoretical Girls), the sheer heft of the 100 guitars made “Hallucination City” much more overwhelming and foreboding than his albums I’m more familiar with, such as 1981’s The Ascension. While songs like my favorite, “Light Field (In Consonance),” feature a squonky rise and fall, “Hallucination City” doesn’t have that same kind of vertical movement; it’s all terminal velocity, like a once-in-a-lifetime storm. In fact, during the first movement, I began to feel panicky from the relentless forward motion. This feeling is produced by Branca’s wacko strumming technique, called “double-strumming,” which is akin to a ceaseless tremolo. This translated to the guitarists both getting a brutal arm workout and producing an unstoppable force through rhythmic repetition. Yet, almost impossibly, notes stand out within this morass. I kept searching for who was playing them onstage and failing miserably.
“Hallucination City” is divided into four movements. Though there are some distinctions, like the staccato opening of the third “Drive,” they all blend somewhat. They all feature an ebb and flow of noise, at times hitting a fevered pitch. This extended repeated sound—only stopped between the movements for a merciful water break and a breather for the guitarists–had a hypnotic effect on me. I was paying attention, but my mind wandered based on what I heard. I heard flight schools and hurtling airplanes. I heard the “system blinking red.” I heard collision and wreckage. But most of all, I heard what came after the devastation: the fury; the lies that sold us endless wars; the death toll; the expansion of the surveillance state; Obama’s election based on hope and change that, instead, led to broken promises and drone bombing; and, of course, the rise and return of Donnie and even worse than the goons in his administration, his tech fascist buddies who want to rule the world as CEO monarchs. I heard vengeance, which is appropriately the title of the final movement, a perfect description for twenty-five years of political policy based on grievance. In short, “Hallucination City” is the sound of accelerationism. In the playbill, writer and musician Matthew Guerrieri queried, “How will it [the symphony] land in a world so different from that into which it was introduced?” Uh, accurately, Matt. Eerily accurately. Prescient, even. Hell, they should replace Vanilla Ice and play it at Trump’s 250th county fair. In fact, sitting at Lincoln Center, I thought that “Hallucination City” may be the most significant musical composition of the 21st century, alongside its reverse, William Basinski’s similarly powerful The Disintegration Loops, which are also connected to the attacks. Whereas The Disintegration Loops are eerie, elegiac, and ghostly, “Hallucination City” is an inescapable explosion of sonic violence.
Though I like to wallow, it doesn’t have to be entirely doom and gloom. Guerrieri notes in the playbill that there is a hopeful side to this din dystopia: the diverse community of musicians forged by the performance itself. He’s not wrong. The cadre of musicians onstage at Lincoln Center ran the gamut of ages, races, genders, fashions, and performance styles, with some banging their heads like they were at a dingy rock club while others settled back into the tony setting that normally hosts the New York Philharmonic. I tried to pick out some familiar faces, but I only recognized Tim Dahl, who often plays with Lydia Lunch, and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone. I assume that, like most performances of the symphony, the players included both professional and amateur musicians. Its makeup and production reflect the city at its best, a collective of talent, all playing in a droning hive with one score and one goal, a togetherness and single-mindedness also visible in the joyful (and unhinged) Knicks fanaticism these last few weeks (Greg Fox was appropriately wearing a Knicks jersey at the center of the stage).
This communal aspect was further emphasized by a short surprise performance of Thurston Moore’s 2003 “Pelvic Noise” (aka “Guitar Hug”), which he originally did with Kim Gordon. In “Pelvic Noise” (aka “Guitar Hug”), two partners emerged onstage from opposite directions with a hefty thwang and embraced, creating an atrocious squeal from the touch of their bodies and instruments. This intimacy also extended to Branca’s symphony itself, which was conducted by his widow, Reg Bloor, who also played in his ensemble. She attacked her role with a vengeance, shaking her open palms and fists in the air and leaping at the percussive finale. At the conclusion of the symphony, she crumpled and collapsed on her small raised platform. I get it. “Hallucination City” is enough of an endurance test from the second balcony.
Not that the symphony was over after the extended standing O. Before the performance, Adam Shore reminisced about seeing Branca play during Creative Time’s Art in the Anchorage series and noted he still heard the clamor afterward. Bloor, too, in an essay on “Hallucination City” for Sound American, writes, “It’s a sound that stays with you for the rest of the day after the piece is over. You hear it coming out of the subway tunnel or in the air conditioning. You can’t get it out of your ear until the whole world starts to sound like Glenn.” She’s not wrong. Not exactly a catchy earworm, I heard it ricocheting through my head for about 24 hours afterward. Not even the Pride hoedown, the Costume Institute’s even more overpowering soundscape in Costume Art, or the errant screams celebrating the Knicks’ win could knock it out.