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REVIEWS

TROUSER PRESS (2003)
WHARTON TIERS
Brighter Than Life (Atavistic) 1996
WHARTON TIERS ENSEMBLE
Twilight of the Computer Age (Atavistic) 1999

Onetime Glenn Branca collaborator Wharton Tiers’ enduring claim to fame is his role as Fun City recording studio guru, the man behind the dials on key releases by Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., White Zombie and Helmet. In the mid-‘90s, while maintaining employment in a variety of music production gigs (including, with Helmet’s Page Hamilton, producing the William Shatner TV ads for Priceline), Tiers began to put together something of a guitar orchestra with an evolving, revolving roster of players bolstered by his own puissant drumming and the sax bleats of Fletcher Buckley. Experimenting with layered sonic textures and, at its best moments, recalling the instrumentals of rock’n’roll’s heyday, the Ensemble’s oeuvre incorporates as much “Rawhide” and “Walk Don’t Run” as Branca. While the Ensemble’s fun and fervor translates best in its robust, kinetic live shows, the recordings offer a slightly consolidated version of a unique musical approach.

Recorded over the course of five years, Brighter Than Life is an often-fascinating feeling-out of styles. Tiers created roughly half the tracks solo as overdubbed studio experiments, mostly extensions of ideas first postulated within the framework of Branca’s daring compositions for rock guitar. Yet the highlights are Ensemble pieces, particularly “Sheet Metal Workers,” which boasts the album’s greatest number of contributors (four guitars, bass, drums and sax).

Touring must have strengthened the band’s focus, because Twilight of the Computer Age locates a winning formula. Though “five guitars, sax, bass and drums” is the description on the back of the CD, no less than eight guitarists contributed to the recording. Once the title rave-up bursts out of the gate with a driving surf beat for the new millennium, Twilight of the Computer Age is an unstoppable tour de force of whirling dervishry (“Rakshak”), disjointed weirdness (“Peaking on Mars”), cow-punk (“Sandy Rides Again”), cow-space-punk (“Lonesome Space Cowboy”) and “Rumble”-esque backstreet blues themes (“Five” — which is, of course, track 4).

In 2000, the Ensemble provided music for a dance production I, Rasputin, in New York.

Twilight Of The Computer Age
Time Out New York, Jan. '00:

Any New York post-rock instrumental ensemble with five guitarists -- six, counting the bassist -- evokes the legacy of mass-guitar composer Glenn Branca. And as a producer, engineer and drummer, Wharton Tiers has worked with many downtown-din elders, including Sonic Youth, Helmet, and Swans. So it's hardly surprising that the Wharton Tiers Ensemble's Twilight Of The Computer Age includes passages that ripple like the aftermath of dropping a practice amp into the center of an electirc pond. At other times, though, the album recalls the Surfaris.

The guitars' principle foil is saxophonist Fletcher Buckley, whose presence sometimes makes the group sound douwnright jaunty. On the compositions credited to the band's namesake, rather than the entire group, Tiers especially favors the sort of Cossack-dance melodies introduced to surf music by Dick Dale. Drone fans may find "Rakshak" and the title track almost too rakish.

Elsewhere, however, the power shifts to the guitarists, who include former members of New Radiant Storm King, the Mad Scene and Speed The Plough, as well as a current member of the D.C. massed-guitar troupe Tone. Even on such slow-grinding tracks as "Peaking On Mars" and "In Orbit", though, WTE is not as monomaniacal as Branca. Perhaps it's band democracy, or maybe Tiers just likes variety, but Twilight Of The Computer Age rarely approaches the time-slowing mesmerism of the most devoutly minimalist rock. The group usually chooses entertainment over transcendence, which should sound like a good trade to those who never found Branca transcendental anyway.

Mark Jenkins

The Wharton Tiers Ensemble played London's Barbican Theatre on Halloween night, 1998, as part of the Glenn Branca Guitar Swarm. This account was written my ensemble member John Nielson and originally published by Pipeline magazine.