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Margaret de Wys, Glenn Branca. Oil on canvas, 11x14 inches, 2021.
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For a few years now I have the CD
Theoretical Record by Theoretical Girls downloaded into my iTunes folder. I'm delighted every time a song from this collection pops up when I have the iTunes library set in shuffle mode.
Keyboard Etude is a second keyboard spectacle high up in the list of the Top 100 2021 (
Rated X by Miles Davis is the other one.) I did regard Theoretical Girls as Glenn Branca's band and didn't think there were any women in Theoretical Girls. (I knew that Barbara Ess, who died in March of this year, was with Branca in The Static.) Theoretical Girls was formed in 1976 by Branca and Jeffrey Lohn and also included Wharton Tiers and Margaret de Wys. De Wys played keyboards in the band so I must assume it is her featuring prominently on
Keyboard Etude. Margaret de Wys is a composer and sound installation artist whose promising career was drastically altered when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. She decided, at the time, to seek alternative healing methods and ended up in Ecuador in the care of a Shuar shaman named Carlos. While I was reading a long interview with de Wys in
Bomb Magazine I was thinking: "Is this the same shaman I painted just
a few weeks ago?" As it turns out the Shuar shaman is a different individual as the one who worked with de Wys, but it affirmed to me how interconnected and cohesive the songs and paintings of the Top 100 2021 are. Margaret de Wys has written several books on shamanism and healing since.
Margaret was an integral element of Glenn's Symphony#4, which toured the pre-EU in Sp'83 \ that work featured 7 keyboard configurations, all except a detuned clavinet were custom-built variations on harpsichords w/single coil pick-ups for amplification, along w/e-gtrs, steel gtr, harmonic gtrs, drums (Stephan) u. bass (Barbara) \ although recorded in A'dam (partial, for the annual HollandFestival), Geneva (partial, by SSR-2), u.Frankfurt (complete @ Bachkopf[?] by DR3), this piece has never been rls'd on any medium \ the dense combination of plucked, struck, strummed. and picked strings generated an intense 'cloud' of harmonic consonance barely recreated in his subsequent visions \ AND... it was a train tour!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this information. I was quite young in 1983 but I do recall learning about Branca early on. De VPRO (radio and tv) always spent a lot of airtime on the Holland festival which was for me an introduction to much avant-garde music.
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