A lost 1983 recording of Glenn Branca's symphony surfaces as a new record

A newly released recording of avant-garde no-wave composer Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 4 surfaced this month, built from a clandestine audience tape of a May 1983 performance in Zurich that British archivist Will Prentice discovered years after the fact. No quality recording of the piece was previously known to exist.

The performance features Branca's custom-built Harmonic Series instruments, designed to draw out the higher-order intervals of the harmonic series, with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo both playing on the recording. A Kickstarter campaign raised the equivalent of roughly 4,000 British pounds to clean up the audio and release it digitally and on CD; the symphony's length ruled out a vinyl pressing.

Reg Bloor, Branca's wife, longtime collaborator and founder of the avant-garde label Systems Neutralizers, said on the recording's Bandcamp page that the tape required real repair work: "It's a gnarly recording, but it's the only document of the piece." The symphony's third movement had been damaged and needed restoration, while its fourth movement, later reworked into Branca's Symphony No. 5, is included here in an edited form for the sake of completeness.

Branca died in 2018, and Bloor has continued using Systems Neutralizers to release archival material from his catalog and to stage performances of his guitar pieces through the Glenn Branca Ensemble.

Over four decades, the ensemble's rotating roster of musicians has included Helmet's Page Hamilton and Swans members Michael Gira and Norman Westberg, alongside Sonic Youth's Moore and Ranaldo, several of whom went on to legendary status of their own in rock and experimental music.

The recording gives Branca's catalog a new entry nearly a decade after his death, and joins the rest of the week's indie and experimental releases tracked on the release calendar, a reminder of how much of his work survived only by accident of who happened to be taping that night.