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LONDON, 1998

The Wharton Tiers Ensemble played London's Barbican Theatre on Halloween night, 1998, as part of the Glenn Branca Guitar Swarm. This account was originally published by Pipeline magazine.
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For two weeks a roar has been emanating from a small NYC rehearsal studio. The Guitar Swarm has been months in the making, but even so pieces are being learned -- and even written -- right up to the day we leave for London. The 6 interrelated groups within the "swarm" have been tightening up arrangements nearly every evening, and at any given time band members can be seen bouncing between 2, 3 or even 4 different rehearsals a night.

Finally Thursday night arrives, and we all convene at the studio to meet a pair of rented vans for the ride out to Kennedy. Well, not all of us -- some will make their way to London on their own. And frankly, no one seems to know how many of us there are! While we've numbered all the guitar cases from 1 to 18, somehow no one seemed to get around to doing that with the musicians themselves. Past a certain point, things are just trusted to work out.

Moving through an airport is never much fun, but doing it with a loose entourage that doesn't even know its own size is another thing entirely. We meet Page Hamilton and Ben Neill at checkin -- they'll be doing a show in the foyer of the Barbican before the evening show. Those of us who aren't aquainted have plenty of time when they announce at the gate that unnamed things need to be "fixed" on the plane, and that we'll be waiting longer than expected.

The flight is packed, and so are we, like sardines. My knees are wedged into the back of the seat in front of me even before the person in front of me decides to lean the seat back. I'll be in some sort of discomfort for the next 6 hours, but do the sensible thing and put on the free sleep mask, jam the headphones in my ears, and try to knock myself out with free airline scotch.

We arrive at Heathrow Friday morning, local time. Customs is a breeze, and when I give my occupation as "musician" the officer looks up and asks if I'm "in the group". Apparently, as Artists Performing At A Government Sponsored Event we are "expected". There's a charter bus waiting for us, and it quickly fills up with bodies and gear for the hour long ride into the city. We're being put up at the Strand Palace Hotel, where we settle in before figuring out what to do with the rest of the day. For some of us the decision is eventually made over bitters in a nearby pub, and it turns out to be: drink, eat fish&chips, wander along the Thames for a while, catch a "Waterloo Sunset", and then meet up with some others for French food.

Saturday is a long day. We've been warned that London is a long way from Seattle, coffee-wise, so when we discover an American-style espresso joint we hastily fuel up. Then it's back on the bus for the ride over to the Barbican and a day of setup and soundchecks. The outside of the hall is inauspicious, a great monstrous post-war multiplex, but the room itself is a delight, big, ornate, and lively (and a far cry from the clubs I'm used to, though many of the Branca entourage are veterans of this sort of thing).

Soundchecks go in reverse order, so Branca is up first, running through sections of his piece, which is debuting that night. It turns out that it's been coming together at the last minute, and while many sections of it get rehearsed that afternoon the evenings performance will not just be its debut, it will also be the first time it's ever played all the way through. Similar stories play out the rest of the afternoon. I'm only in one group, the Wharton Tiers Ensemble, which finally gets its turn late in the afternoon, after which we retire to the restaurant upstairs to grab some food and catch part of Page and Ben's set.

When evening arrives I wander out into the main hall to catch the show. Jon Bepler is up first, leading off the evening with an engagingly skronky piece. Then Jon Myers' Blastula takes the stage, and his massed E-bowed guitars fill the hall with warm, dense drones. Unfortunately I end up listening to most of it from backstage, one of many people who seem to be pacing and chatting and tuning and retuning. I spend some time getting used to a borrowed second guitar, which I've detuned to G. Considering how many of the axes sitting around are strung and tuned to Glenn's unusual specifications, it's harder to find a "normal" guitar than might be expected. In the process I come up with an interesting variation on a part for our newest song which hasn't totally gelled yet, and after drilling it for a few minutes I feel confident enough to want to put it in the song.

When the drones fade to applause it's time to move. The Barbican tech folks are thorough professionals, and we're ready in the time it takes everyone to move their cords and boxes and guitars into place. Then the lights go up, and we're off.

It's in the show contract that our backline will consist of vintage Fender tube amps, and playing our set through a row of old Twins is a heady experience. Our ensemble is used to getting a sound with lots of 15-watt amps wound out to the max, so this is like graduating from sports cars to jets. Add to that the realization that we can actually hear ourselves as a group "in the room" of this opera house -- instead of hearing just our own amps and a crappy monitor mix --and it's hard not to get excited.

We've pared down to 5 numbers to fit in our allotted 30-min. set, and they seem to go by in a blur. "Cloud of Dust" is just a warm-up, and we seem to really catch our groove on "The 9th", and my part works out fine. We downshift for a bit on "The Honourable Craw Ling", which starts off all faux-Chinese and works its way towards its lovely slow rippling melodic ending. The driving syncopations of "Twilight" are next, and then it's our big finale, "Sheet Metal Workers". This is our signature song, a 10-minute opus that builds and builds, and with a fifth guitarist and 400 watts of Fender Tube Power it scales new heights tonight.

After a short intermission Phil Kline performs a solo piece for multiple boomboxes, which seems to win over the crowd (specially the quote from Led Zeppelin). He also brings on an ensemble to perform "The Garden Of Divorce", which turns out to be one of the most charming pieces of the night. Virgil Moorefield's set is by contrast the least guitar-centric of the evening, a chamber work for violin/cello/synth/guitar/sax called "The Temperature In Hell Is Over Three Thousand Degrees".

The evening's finale is premiering Glenn Branca's "Symphony No. 12 (Tonal Sexus)", and it's a surging, churning, ultimately mesmerizing performance. At the front of the stage Glenn clenches and unclenches, gesturing and gyrating before his ensemble, seemingly drawing wave after wave of sound into being through sheer force of will. From where I sit the sound is awesome, a fierce roar with a halo of harmonics, but I have to admit I'm happy not to be in the first few rows, at ear level with all those amplifiers.

After the final chords ring out and the dust clears and the lights go up we begin the long process of loading up the bus and for the trip back to the hotel. Trying to organize a big after-show hang proves futile, like trying to herd a 30-headed sheep. Eventually the party splits into smaller groups, and ours ends up in the tiny basement of an Italian restaurant where Young London is disco dancing in Halloween drag. It's a small price to pay for finding a place that will keep bringing us Czech Budweiser Budvars until 4 am!

The next morning the swarm starts to disperse for good. Some leave for home, some for other parts of Europe on holiday. Wharton and Glenn take off for Paris to meet sponsors who are putting on an epic "2000 Guitars In The Year 2000" millennial bash on the steps of the Grande Arch. Me, I do a lot of walking around London, get familiar with a classic pub near our hotel across town, and take in a day trip to Stonehenge. It really is 11 inches high, you know... -- John Neilson, 1999