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Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp:
"We are the Reality of this Cyberpunk Fantasy"
IN CONVERSATION WITH MARK DERY

Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp philosophize with a hammer. And an
anvil. And a stirrup. The two New York composers take Friedrich
Nietzche, who subtitled an essay "How One Philosophizes With a
Hammer," a step further. They make music that jangles the bones of the
inner ear and bruises the brain.

Branca, 42, is a Promethean presence in new music. Emerging from
Manhattan's no wave scene in the late seventies, he smashed the world
to flinders with a single, craggy, monolithic chord-a cluster of E notes, to
be exact, the thunderclap that opens 1979's "The Spectacular
Commodity" (The Ascension, 99 Records). Then, he made it new.
Scored for massed electric guitars amplified past the threshold of aural
pain, "Symphony No. 1: Tonal Plexus" (ROIR) welded the harmonics
and heterodyning effects of minimalism's "acoustic phenomena" school
to Beethoven's stormy bluster, Steve Reich's static harmonies, and the
careening, locomotive fury of heavy metal.

"Symphony No. 3: Gloria-Music For the First 127 Intervals of the
Harmonic Series" (Neutral) called for non-tempered tunings based on the
harmonic series, the naturally- occurring, endlessly-ascending row of
pitches which are multiples of a fundamental frequency. "Within this
internal mechanism exists a body of music," Branca observed in his
program notes, "music which has not been written, but which is
inherently indicated, in much the same way that DNA contains
information." In "Symphony No. 5: Describing Planes of an Expanding
Hypersphere" and subsequent works, Branca used the harmonic series to
conjure otherworldly effects-an ethereal, crystalline whistling reminiscent
of glass harmonica, sonic Spirograph patterns traced in the air by
spiralling melody lines.

In his seventh and most recent symphony, Branca embraces equal
temperament and conventional orchestral instrumentation. Polymetric,
polymorphous, and perverse- there are no melodic themes to speak of,
only ascending harmonies-"Symphony No. 7" suggests Reich's "Desert
Music" in its chattering mallet instruments and attaca movement, Anton
Bruckner in its almost palpable air of mystery, of awe in the prescence of
something that withers words like dry husks.

Although he is not the Brucknerian mystic Branca is, Sharp shares his
fellow composer's obsession with raw power. In music of unutterable
strangeness and mutant beauty, the 40-year-old
composer/multi-instrumentalist summons visions of thermonuclear
fireballs and self-squared dragons, black holes and information whiteout.
On Sili/contemp/tation (Ear-Rational), Monster Curve (SST), and other
Sharp releases, one hears echoes of innumerable influences-gutbucket
blues, Inuit throat-singing, Jimi Hendrix, Krzysztof Penderecki, the
harmonic chanting of Tibetan monks, chaos theory, and fractal
geometry-scrunched into a single skull and subjected to explosive
decompression.

All of which might suggest that Sharp's art is a cross between the neural
spin art of a theoretical physicist at mid-orgasm and the climax of the
movie Altered States, where the protagonist devolves into Silly Putty.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Sharp, like Branca, is a
hyperintellectual who frequently makes use of mathematical equations
in his work. He has explored the farflung reaches of the harmonic series
and has written works in just intonation, the microtonal tuning system
favored by Harry Partch. Moreover, his compositional architecture,
tuning systems, and rhythms are often generated using the Fibonacci
series, mathematical ratios derived by summing a number and its
precedent- 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so forth.

"The music," informs Sharp in his liner notes to Larynx (SST), "dances
upon the ever- changing boundary between a geometry derived from the
Fibonacci series and a fractal geometry of turbulence, chaos and
disorder."

Astonishingly, the two composers had never met, a fact that defies the
laws of probability given their parallel courses and the close confines of
New York's downtown music scene. Fortuitously, both will have new
recordings in the racks. One of Branca's older works, "Symphony No. 2,"
is being released by the Chicago-based indie, Atavistic.  Subtitled "The
Peak of the Sacred," it relies on homebuilt "staircase guitars"-lap
steel/hammer dulcimer hybrids arranged in tiers, their open strings played
with chop sticks-to produce an eerie, lambent rainbow of sound, the
aural equivalent of Northern Lights. The second half of "Symphony No.
2" spotlights Z'ev, a Mad Max Roach of sorts who plays springs, pipes,
titanium sheets, and strips of cold-rolled steel.

Sharp's September offerings consist of Datacide and Twistmap
(Enemy/Indie and Ear- Rational, respectively, the latter available from
Ear-Relevant, 547 W. 20th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10011).
Datacide, which showcases the guitarist's quartet, Carbon, is forty-nine
minutes of neurocore-clotted, convulsive songs that are equal parts dark
matter and gray matter. Twistmap features the title track and
"Shapeshifters," two astringent pieces for strings interpreted by the
Soldier String Quartet, and "Ferrous," a rambunctious instrumental
performed by Carbon on instruments designed and built by Sharp.
Among them are the pantar, an electric string instrument whose angry
buzz Sharp describes as "a cross between a tamboura and a dumpster,"
and the slab, an unlovely creation fashioned from a hunk of butcher
block fitted with bass strings and pickups.  Drummed with metal rods,
the slab produces a raspy bumbling suggestive of iron bees with rusty
wings.

 Branca and Sharp share an abiding interest in science fiction. Branca, an
obsessive cyberphile, runs JAA Press, a mail-order distributor of
cyberpunk books and related ephemera. His catalog (available from
Prince Street Station, P.O. Box 96, New York, NY 10012) includes many
of the titles mentioned in this interview. Sharp's song and record titles
chronicle a lifelong fixation: "Kipple" and "PKD" allude to Philip K.
Dick, "Cenobite" to Clive Barker's splatterpunk movie, Hellraiser, and
"Dr. Adder" to the Jeter novel of the same name.

Little remained but for MONDO 2000 to introduce the two like-minded
composers. A meeting was arranged in upstate New York, where both
were summering, far from New York City's sopping, sweltering canyons
of steel. Branca graciously conceded to play host at the 200-year-old
cottage on the campus of Bard College, at Annandale-on- Hudson, where
he was staying. Between flaming bites of shrimp-and-jalapeÒo
shishkabob, with hasty gulps of fumÈ blanc to put out the fire, an
experiment in superconductivity was conducted.
-Mark Dery

MONDO 2000: Glenn, your piece 'Freeform' is dedicated to Rudolph
von Bitter Rucker. It's a shimmering, pastel work for orchestra, driven
by vibraphones and glockenspiels-not exactly the soundtrack I hear in
my head when I'm reading Rucker's novels!

GLENN BRANCA: Well, I had already named the piece 'Freeform'
when I discovered that Rucker had founded the 'freestyle' movement in
science fiction. Since I love everything that Rucker writes, it was a happy
coincidence. Beyond that, however, there isn't the slightest connection
between my music and my interest in cyberpunk writing. I came to
cyberpunk through the mathematical ideas I was exploring in my
composing. I was looking for books on mathematics and one of the
books I discovered was Rucker's Infinity and the Mind. The
bibliography included a list of the other titles he'd written and since I
hadn't read any science fiction at all, I thought it would be a goof to see
what it was like. So I read his novel, Master of Space and Time, which I
loved.

M2: Relatively speaking, you've come lately to science fiction, whereas
Elliott has been a lifelong sci-fi buff. ELLIOTT SHARP: I was a science
nerd. I started reading sci-fi the first time I went to the library. Ray
Bradbury was an early find. He definitely did not hew to the idiot techno-
fascist school of sci-fi. That was the thing about Robert Heinlein, Isaac
Asimov, and most of those older writers. They were so jingoistic, taking
their xenophobia to outer space.

GB: Did you read Philip K. Dick when you were young?

 ES: Definitely. His stories always stuck in my mind, especially "The
Father Thing," where this kid's father has been taken over by an alien
and the kid has to kill it before the Mother Thing is released. Don't you
remember feeling, when you were a teenager, that your family was a
collection of alien creatures? [Laughter]

M2: Dick, for all his darkness, was a true Groucho Marxist. Rucker has
that same quality, especially in Master of Space and Time, which is
wonderfully sophomoric-quantum mechanics for people who like to
squeeze off armpit farts.

GB: Rucker's writing is cartoony but very fluid. You see, I wasn't
reading fiction at all when I got into Rudy Rucker. The fact is, I don't
like fiction! Only cyberpunk actually deals with contemporary culture in
a way that I can relate to. I like to think of it as rock 'n' roll fiction. It has
replaced the kind of teeth-grinding intensity I used to get listening to rock
music.

ES: One thing that occurs to me about cyberpunk is that it is actually the
only political literature being written these days, and it's always
sympathetic to marginalized subcultures. It comes from the underdog's
perspective. If there's one recurrent theme in cyberpunk, it's this idea of
taking technology out of the hands of the techno-fascists, of networking
on unofficial levels.

M2: But it still has the technofetishism of the old wiring-diagram school
of science fiction. One closes these books feeling that body armor and
laser Uzis are really sexy. Tomorrow's technology is the soft
machine-small and sexy and internalized, nanomachines and
biomechanic implants.

ES: Right, but you can't separate the hardware from the software. You'll
always have technofetishism of one sort or another.

GB: I think that some of the writers are trying to move away from the
techno aspects of the genre but what's left ends up being something like
Lewis Shiner's Slam, which is not cyberpunk or even science fiction.
Although I would like to see a few more plot problems solved with
something other than a laser gun, the real-world application of these
ideas doesn't really interest me. I like the fiction, and that's where I think
cyberpunk lives.

JAMES JOYCE, PROTO-CYBERPUNK

M2: Who do you two feel are the proto-cyberpunks in literary history?
For my money, there are four authors-all of them outside the science
fiction continuum, strictly speaking-who blazed the trail for cyberpunk:
William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, and more
recently, Don DeLillo.

GB: Burroughs and Pynchon, certainly, but I would have added Norman
Spinrad and Dick.

ES: Burroughs and Pynchon, absolutely, and I would really have to add
Joyce to that list.

GB: James Joyce was a proto-cyberpunk?!

M2: That's legitimate!

GB: It isn't even slightly legitimate!

ES: Yes, for his consciousness! The brain became a different organ in
Finnegans Wake.

GB: Oh, all right. You could probably convince me. Cyberpunk may
catch up with Finnegans Wake by the year 2095, but none of these
writers are doing anything remotely like Joyce's novels, and I hope they
never do. I don't need any more Russolo or Duchamp or Cage, although
I have heard that Paul Di Filippo's new book, Ciphers, is his Gravity's
Rainbow and it'll probably be great.

But I don't think experimental fiction is really the right direction for
cyberpunk. That's what happened to the English new wave in the sixties.
Cyberpunk brought back the energy of new wave in much the same way
that punk music brought back the essential energy of sixties rock. There
were a few people, like Charles Platt, Mick Farren, Jeter, and Spinrad,
who continued to define near-future dystopian chaos right through the
seventies, and I'm sure Sterling and Shirley were aware of them.

M2: So the trail of the first cyberpunk novel leads all the way back to
Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock?

ES: Further than that, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Fritz
Lang's Metropolis.      GB: To me, though, the person who has the key
to this kind of writing is Burroughs. You can go back and re-read
Burroughs and even though you understand his world, it's always a
mystery.

ES: I get a buzz from Naked Lunch that I don't get from most of his
other books, although I love them all.

GB: Really? I think the later books are better-The Wild Boys, The Soft
Machine, Nova Express. And Interzone! If you read that last story-the
one that wasn't included in Naked Lunch-that is Burroughs to the
fucking 10th power! See, my hope is that cyberpunk is going to end up
simply becoming Burroughs. I'm just looking for more Burroughs! To go
beyond Burroughs_I can't even begin to imagine! ES: Isn't that what
we're really looking forward to-the book that we can't imagine? I keep
wondering when a work of art come along that will introduce me to a
new way of thinking?

SLAMMING THE CYBERPUNKS

GB: There have been all these attacks on cyberpunk writing in the last
year or two, among them that Lewis Shiner essay in The New York
Times, saying the genre is dead. At the same time, there's an amazing
scene happening in England, revolving around a group of young
cyberpunk writers, most of whom are published in Interzone-people like
Charles Stross, who calls his work "technogoth," and Lyle Hopwood, a
female writer who recently moved to the States, and Glenn Grant, a
young Canadian who publishes a Montreal-based fiction magazine called
Edge Detector.

And then there's Alligator Alley, which is supposedly a collaboration
between Jeter and a cartoonist named Ferret, under the pseudonyms Dr.
Adder and Mink Mole. [Actually written by Tim Ferret-ed.] If cyberpunk
is going to lead somewhere that isn't cyberpunk, this is one direction it
could take. The book is_sick. It sounds as if it had been written by an
incredibly talented underground writer, somebody like Bart Plantenga,
the Beer Mystic, who used to appear in the newsletter published by
WFMU radio and who has spent time on the 'zine scene. Plantenga
wrote one completely wild story about a guy driving around the city,
crashing into everything. Alligator Alley is strikingly similar-hardcore
misanthropy, pushed to unbelievably absurd extremes. The book takes
place on a strip called Alligator Alley in Florida, which apparently
actually exists. It's a stretch of road where alligators and other animals
are constantly being run over. The main characters spend almost the
entire narrative on this one thoroughfare.

M2: Do they run over any alligators?

GB: Oh, they run over everything you can possibly imagine-endlessly!
The book has that repetitive, Burroughsian quality about it. "Roadkill"
is the last word you'll ever want to hear after you finish it.

The second half of Alligator Alley begins with an infodump in which the
authors avalanche about five books' worth of plot material onto you in
about a chapter and a half, after which they continue with the narrative
on a totally different level. The book is amazingly dense and that's just
what I want!

I want to be blown away on every page! I don't care where the narrative
is going; just get me off right now, in this sentence! Of course, the book
has to keep giving it to me, and for the first 150 pages, that's exactly what
Alligator Alley does.

M2: It sounds like Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist,
which, for me, is like a cut-up novel for the blipvert generation.

ES: That was one of the most hilarious books I've ever read.

AUPRES MOI LE DATA-DELUGE!

M2: Doesn't it strike you as odd that, while our culture is drowning in
this data deluge, we as individuals seem to thrive on information
overload?

ES: Well, the need to be constantly stimulated is modern life, but it's also
human. A nerve impulse has its effect for only so long before the
infocaine wears off.

GB: What's vital about cyberpunk, to my mind, is this idea of the
underground network. I mean, most of the interesting cyberpunk stuff
deals with the alternative network- hackers and artists and musicians,
renegades who are living outside of consensus reality as we see it on
television. For me, the best extrapolations from this culture have been
Peter Lamborn Wilson's pirate nation-state, Port Watson, in the short
piece of the same name; Glenn Grant's techno-nomads in his story
"Mimetic Drift;" Misha's dystopian art world in Red Spider, White Web;
and Pat Murphy's city of artists in The City, Not Long After.

This anti-society already exists all over the country, not just in the urban
centers. Again, the cyberpunk novelists are doing exactly what the new
wave writers were doing in the sixties. The difference is, the culture has
become so much more sophisticated than it was in the sixties.

M2: The silicon underground has become a reality.

ES: Right. And bearing in mind where you and I hook into all of this, I
have to ask: Why hasn't music kept pace with these developments?

GB: Oh, but it has!

ES: I don't know about that. If you look at pop music, what do you
have? College rock!

GB: But we, Elliott, are the reality of this cyberpunk fantasy, I'm sorry
to say. [Laughter] To be honest, though, I don't think I've ever heard a
musical analog for cyberpunk literature.

ES: Well, that's just it. You hear something and say, "Do I make the
connection because I've been told it exists or do I make the connection
because it's actually there?" For example, Sonic Youth called themselves
"cyberpunk" at one point, but if you listened to a Sonic Youth record
without knowing that, would you say, "Oh, these guys are clearly
cyberpunks?"

GB: The closest I've come to cyberpunk music is Dane Rudhyar's
description of music that he would have loved to have heard. It was in
The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, where he imagines a kind of
science fiction music, created with the push of a button.

A LITTLE PO-APOC NIGHT MUSIC

ES: Did you ever read Memories of Whiteness, by Kim Stanley
Robinson? It's about this human colony in the future, where the language
is based on musical analogies and musical terms. It's a little bit corny, a
little New Age-y, but it has its moments.

There's also a story by Cordwainer Smith called "Under Old Earth"
which revolves around music and the rebel underground. Although
Smith wrote in the fifties, he was really pretty visionary. This story takes
place in a post-apocalypse, post-history New York and features an
underground culture of subversives that has rituals where they play
Einsturzende Neubaten-type music, banging on metal in odd meters, all
fives and sevens.

M2: There's another treatment of cyber-rock, in John Shirley's
"Freezone," in Mirrorshades.

GB: That's an excerpt from his novel Eclipse, in which the main
character is a musician named Rickenharp. Shirley does music, you
know. He sings with the guitarist Michael Chocholak, the husband of
Misha, who happens to be a great cyberpunk writer. He made
soundtracks for Alligator Alley and Red Spider, White Web, and if you
buy the special editions from the English publisher, Morrigan,
Chocholak's cassette tapes come with the book.

Shirley has made, at this point, about an album's worth of songs with
Chocholak. I've heard some of them and they're fantastic! Shirley is still
coming from a sixties orientation, a Jim Morrison kind of thing, but if
you like Shirley's writing and you know Rickenharp, you'll like the
music, because it really is the soundtrack that goes with his books.
Strangely enough, the music, although somewhat anachronistic, is
appropriate. I mean, what is the proper modern music to accompany
cyberpunk?

ES: Exactly.

GB: I mean, is it some futuristic-sounding electronic beep-boop music or
what? Lucius Shepard, who is very, very into music-I think he used to
have a band, although I don't believe he makes music now-has written a
"recommended" list. Hypno Love Wheel was on it, as well as Gaye Bikers
on Acid. And then there's fractal music, which I haven't heard a note of.
Richard Kadrey is calling his new book Kamikaze L'Amour: A Rock 'n'
Roll Novel-maybe he'll give us some idea of what this stuff should sound
like.

EAT YOUR FRACTALS, GEORGE

ES: There's a guy at Princeton who did some fractal music. It's the
musical illusion of a never-ending cycle, descending and then ascending,
over and over again, a musical perpetual motion machine. It's not a bad
aural analogy for a Mandlebrot set, but it completely avoids the whole
issue.

For me, fractals are an analogy to a natural form and function, whereas
fractal music is an impression of an analogy of natural phenomena. A
mathematical equation can only offer an abstraction, an idealized picture
of this natural form and function. Fractals don't depict things as they
really are. They merely define the laws whereby you can make an
analogy.

GB: You can make a piece of music that's as interesting as a fractal; the
problem is, a fractal is nowhere near as interesting as a beautiful
landscape. Cellular automata, for instance, are about as sophisticated as
ant farms. It's going to take a long time for mathematics to find a true
analog for macro-scale natural processes.

ES: That's the problem. It always comes down to mathematics, which
deals in curves, whereas nature always comes down to discrete moments.
In the real world, one never really finds an ideal fractal. One finds fractal
situations-things that can be analyzed down to fractals.

GB: Because of their self-similarities.

ES: Yeah. Have you ever seen a Broccoli Romanescu?

GB: What the hell is a Broccoli Romanescu?!?

ES: I was in Seattle, going through the outdoor market, and I ran into a
hippie farmer with this pile of large, round, green things that turned out
to be a type of broccoli that is completely self-similar. It's right out of
Mandlebrot's book! The first time you lay eyes on them, you think
you've found some sort of hallucinatory vegetable, or hallucinated
vegetable. And if you slice them in quarters, they yield perfect Julia sets,
these self- similar curves. A little bland-tasting, sadly. [Laughter]

CHAOS: NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA...

GB: But I don't think we have to have an actual, real-life analog for
cyberpunk fiction.  What's great about it is that we can only live in it in
the writing itself.

ES: Well, if we had implants, we could just go direct, brain to CD.

GB: Sure, and it would probably sound like a fucking mess! [Laughter]

ES: Well, maybe. The brain isn't delineated into these neat little sections,
contrary to pop psych right brain/left brain models. It's a very large-scale
integrative system. There's order, there's chaos, there's intuition, and
there's formality, all operating simultaneously.

M2: Speaking of chaos, does chaos theory resonate with either of your
musics?

ES: My music was always about that even before I knew about chaos
theory because I always liked the idea of that borderline where things
get...funny.

GB: James Gleick's book, Chaos, only gave you the surface while
deluding you into thinking that you could understand what this stuff was
about. The reason I liked Infinity and the Mind was that it actually led
me into higher mathematics, to places I had never gone, especially
transcendental numbers.

ES: Does God Play Dice?: The Mathematics of Chaos, by Ian Stewart,
contains a better description of chaos than the Gleick book. He quotes
Gleick in some places, but he digs far deeper.

DOWN THE BRAIN-DRAIN, OR COGITO ERGO SUMP

GB: And the deeper you get into this stuff, the more you realize you have
to be deeply into it to have even the slightest idea of what's going on. If
there's ever an analog for the human brain, it will require a computer
that works at light speed, at the very least.

ES: Because the brain is not a digital machine. I'm reading Surely You're
Joking, Mr. Feynmann. He would look at a problem and rather than
getting down to any equations, he would imagine models in the real
world, going right to whether or not something made sense intuitively. So
if you think about the brain and how it works, and then you think about
the nature of digital processing and what we know about how we think,
it seems unlikely that thought processes can be reduced to a series of
on/offs no matter how many connections you have, or how fast they are.

M2: Cognition is non-binary and non-linear, the great revelation people
come to after scouring their brainpans with blotter acid.

ES: Exactly, and it's also why the hard AI guys are barking up the wrong
tree. The techno-geeks can't even figure out what "I" is.

I think we're coming to the end of a cycle, the end of our type of
consciousness. An analogy would be a Gˆdelian process of manipulating
unimaginably large numbers, numbers which are really processes
themselves, but manipulating them as if they're discrete entities. Once
you bump your point of view up to another scale, you can see the forest
and the trees, and you become aware of the syntax of these processes and
their interaction. They become graspable, usable baby blocks and things
like AI become easy (although the phrase AI itself would probably have
to be redefined). We've reached a conceptual barrier. It's time for a
quantum leap.

GB: It's going to be a hell of a leap.