Carbon Monoxide

“Carbon Monoxide” appears on The Ascension: The Sequel, Glenn Branca’s 2010 return to the four-guitar, bass, and drums format of his 1981 debut The Ascension. Branca was a composer and theorist who used rock instrumentation to build orchestral structures. The guitars are not playing songs. They are establishing systems, generating overtones, creating physical pressure in the room. Branca understood that distortion at volume was not an effect. It was an environment.

The original Ascension in 1981 featured Lee Ranaldo on guitar, two years before Ranaldo and Thurston Moore formed Sonic Youth. Both Moore and Ranaldo played in Branca’s ensemble in the early 1980s. Branca’s concerts launched the careers of Sonic Youth, Swans, and Helmet: three bands whose approaches to guitar noise diverged radically but all drew from the same source. His later symphonies expanded the concept. Symphony No. 13 and Symphony No. 16 each deployed 100-guitar lineups. Every guitar band that built noise into architecture rather than decoration owes something to what Branca assembled.

Branca was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1948 and moved to New York City in 1976. He came out of the downtown no wave scene, a brief avant-garde movement that rejected rock conventions in favor of dissonance and confrontation. No wave lasted roughly four years. Branca lasted four decades. He kept composing, kept returning to the guitar orchestra as the instrument most capable of producing the sound he was after. The Ascension: The Sequel arrived in 2010, nearly thirty years after the original. Branca died in May 2018. The gap between the two Ascensions is its own argument about persistence.