Shane Parish first came on my radar about a year and a half ago when he released his gorgeous fingerstyle guitar interpretation of Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th." He's continued to release beautiful music since then, including noisier fare as a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Today he's announcing a new project that carries on that spirit of that Aphex Twin cover.
Autechre Guitar is exactly what the title makes it sound like: a collection of 10 songs from the catalog of abstract electronic music legends Autechre performed by Parish on acoustic guitar. "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all," the great Philip Sherburne writes to kick off the liner notes. Yet it does exist, and it's wonderful.
Orcutt, whose label Palilalia is releasing the album, writes on Bandcamp, "Shane's been working on this one a LONG time. Transcribing music is his thing — he created the score for [Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet's] Music For Four Guitars — but notating and arranging the dense soundscapes of electronic music duo Autechre for solo acoustic guitar has been his Everest."
Apparently Parish has been toying around with bringing Autechre to the acoustic since the 2000s, so it's pretty exciting to see it all come to fruition. Here's part of what he himself wrote about the project:
I honestly cannot believe we’ve arrived at this moment! The seeds of this project were planted way back in 2002 when Courtney Chappell first introduced me to Autechre’s 1994 album Amber. The CD was on constant rotation in our basement apartment. It was bleak midwinter, and I sat there and slowly figured out how to play the 29-beat melody to the song “Slip”. I jotted down some chicken scratch tablature in a notebook and it sat on the shelf for over two decades, occasionally coming down to be tinkered with.
Over the course of that time, I arranged and performed hundreds of songs from different genres. In 2024, I recorded two pieces of electronic music on acoustic guitar—“Europe Endless” by Kraftwerk and “Avril 14th” by Aphex Twin—which appear on my album “Repertoire”. Engaging with these masterpieces of electronic music put the wind in my sails to pursue this much larger project of navigating the complexity of Autechre in album-length form.
Autechre Guitar is the result of my deep love and respect for this otherworldly music, and a desire to render its crystalline poetry as expressively as I can on the acoustic guitar
Below, check out the first two songs from Autechre Guitar, "Maetl" and "Eggshell."
TRACKLIST:
01 "Maetl"
02 "Eggshell"
03 "Eutow"
04 "Slip"
05 "Bike"
06 "Nine"
07 "Yulquen"
08 "Lowride"
09 "Corc"
10 "Clipper"
Autechre Guitar is out 2/27 via Palilalia. Pre-order it here.
