Sleeve notes
Glenn Branca
The Ascension · 1981
Glenn Branca emerged from New York's no wave scene in the late 1970s as a composer working at the intersection of rock instrumentation and minimalist classical music, building pieces for ensembles of a dozen or more electric guitars tuned to create dense, overtone-rich walls of sound. His early ensembles included musicians who would go on to form some of the era's most significant bands, and his label, Neutral Records, released early records by several of them.
The Ascension (1981) brought Branca's massed-guitar approach to its first widely heard statement, treating the electric guitar less as a vehicle for riffs or solos than as a raw material for something closer to orchestral composition. Branca continued composing increasingly ambitious guitar-ensemble symphonies over the following decades, maintaining a foot in both the classical avant-garde and the rock underground his early work had helped shape, and his direct mentorship of younger guitarists left a lasting mark on the no wave and noise-rock scenes that followed.
