6. Glenn BrancaAscension
This was the first time I’d heard guitars played that way, and the famous YouTube clip of him just going mental on the Telecaster, I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve got one of the original records, it was really expensive. Lee Ranaldo was on that, and Ned Sublette, he was doing a piece with Peter Gordon at Cafe Oto. With Glenn Branca, it really feels that there was something going on with that group of musicians in New York in the early 80s. If I could be reborn and doing music, I wish it was then, to be within it, though I don’t know if I could contribute much, to be honest, as there was so much creativity and activity going on, reconstructing the whole idea of how music should be listened to and looked upon. They’d all been to college and studied, I like that idea of eradicating everything you’ve learned and starting again to try and make something new. Like the KTL album, It’s all based on the feeling and instinctiveness, and I don’t see ‘music’ as the correct term for it really, there should be another sense for it… it’s quite inexplainable, what it can do, you have to experience it at full volume, which takes it up another level. Volume as an instrument in its own right – the same with Pansonic.
