I was in Record Collector in Broomhill one day in the late '80s and I must have been buying an Eliott Sharp album, and the proprietor, Barry, said, "I've got something that may interest you." He disappeared to the private part of the shop and returned with this Glenn Branca bootleg LP. (I'm pretty sure it's a bootleg: the sound quality is that of an audience recording, and there's nothing on the cover other than that what you see on the front, which just says it was recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1988.) I was pretty flattered to be recognised as a discerning customer with out-of-the-ordinary tastes, and of course I bought the LP, even though it was pretty expensive. The experience was almost enough to make me come back and buy more obscure stuff in the hope of finding out more about what was stowed away behind the counter.
It would be lazy to say that once you've heard one Glenn Branca record you've heard them all. But to the non-obsessive, there is some truth in this (his contributions to the Belly of an Architect soundtrack being an exception). Of course, I haven't heard them all, so don't trust what I say.
However, a few years after I bought this, on 27 February 1994, I saw Branca perform at the Leadmill in Sheffield, and it was very much like this record. Which, in case you don't know, is a mass of electric guitars, treading a line between the drone of La Monte Young and the repetitive rhythms of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. It takes a particular skill, discipline and sensibility to mine a narrow and simple seam of ideas and make it fresh and interesting each time. I think Steve Reich stands out as the most successful example of that. In Branca's case, though, it's like he inhabits a small ghetto of his own making.
Not a lot of people know this: in parts of the creative community round Whitechapel, Glenn Branca is used as rhyming slang, as in, "I don't trust that bloke, he's a bit of a Glenn."
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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