LCMF: GLENN BRANCA

Bold Tendencies, Peckham | July 27th

Three things it’s rare to experience when stood in a car park in Peckham on a night when the rain is lashing down so hard you forget that summer could ever exist: a feeling of very genuine ecstasy; a sense of almost physical abandonment; and an overwhelming desire to transcend whatever it is it means to be what we are.

Glenn Branca – avant garde composer, guitar anti-hero, New York No Wave innovator, Diet Coke swigger – and his group made this happen and more. Penned in beneath the trendy environs of Peckham’s carpark-rooftop bar Frank’s, a crowd (you know the exact type of crowd to imagine: that odd 60/40 split of young bearded boys and impossibly glamorous, austere girls)  gathered for what was arguably the star turn at the inaugural London Contemporary Music Festival, a series of performances that sees the likes of outer-reaches stars Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine and Russell Haswell embedding themselves in south-east London.

The performance began slowly with Branca’s three guitarists engaging in the kind of noodling that left this listener fearing the worst. Then things switched up; open chords began to be played with greater intensity, things started to lock in and weave out, the groove – and it may have been a dissonant, pummelling, unpleasent groove, but still definitely a groove – made its presence known. Trying to translate the intensity of the playing, the sheer ferocity of what was coming out of tightly-controlled group conduct, the majesterial, otherworldly feeling of this overwhelmingly constricting, taut, diamond-sharp wall of noise not so much washing over the gathered throng but drenching them, soaking them; trying to find a way of conveying the sense that, at times at least, we were on the verge of either seeing the roof come off or the room explode, into something readable and relateable isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It didn’t feel like having songs played to or for you. It wasn’t watching a few guys blast through a few old hits. It was, without being too grand, as close to perfection as a live perfomance could be. It was bodily, visceral, powerfully real.

The performance ended abruptly. Ten minutes into Twisting in Space the already-pissed-off Branca turned to face the crowd, grabbed his low-slung microphone and chastised the soundman. “Eric”, he began, “fucking asshole. Turn off the goddamn feedback, the only thing I can hear now is the fucking snare drum!” Before Eric had a chance to work things out – which, presumably, with this gig taking place in a space resolutely not suited to intricate, surging, droning, difficult composition pieces, was always going to be a thankless task – Branca had kicked over his music stand and stomped off backstage, leaving his group stood there looking at one another as if this was just something Glenn did every so often. We stood with the house lights on, grins abounding, hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’d come back and for a few more minutes we’d be plunged back into the sonic depths we’d begun to dive head-first into for the last hour. We didn’t get that but, really, it didn’t matter. The rain carried on unabated. We made the slow incline down the multiple ramps of this drab multistory, ears ringing, mouths still grinning.

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London Festival of Contemporary Music continues until August 4th. For more details visit lcmf.co.uk

Words: Josh Baines