Listen to a lost Glenn Branca symphony from 43 years ago featuring members of Sonic Youth

There was thought to be no quality recordings of Branca’s Symphony No. 4 in existence until British archivist Will Prentice discovered a clandestine audience tape of a May 1983 performance in Zurich.

The piece features Branca's custom built Harmonic Series instruments designed to bring out the higher order intervals of the Harmonic Series, and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore also play on the recording. The US dollar equivalent of around £4000 was raised via Kickstarter to have the tape audio cleaned up and to released digitally and on CD.

"It’s a gnarly recording, but it’s the only document of the piece," explains Reg Bloor, Branca's wife, longtime collaborator and founder of avant-garde record label Systems Neutralizers on the recording's Bandcamp page. "Glenn was only going to release the first two movements because the Movement Three was damaged, and the Movement Four has been reworked and included in Symphony No. 5. We were able to do a lot of repair work to Movement Three, and Movement Four is included here for the sake of completion, though the beginning has been edited." Due to the length of both the entire symphony and each movement, a vinyl release of the new recording is not feasible, Bloor adds.

Systems Neutralizers was founded by Bloor and Branca to release their own music. Since Branca's passing in 2018, Bloor has also been using the label put on exclusive performances of Branca's guitar pieces by the Glenn Branca Ensemble, made up of musicians who played with him while he was alive.

Over four decades, the Glenn Branca Ensemble has featured a rotating roster of musicians, many of whom have gone on to legendary status in rock and experimental music, including Helmet's Page Hamilton, and Michael Gira and Norman Westberg from Swans, as well as Sonic Youth guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.