Autechre Guitar

Description

Strictly speaking, this album should not even exist. It is not simply a matter of Autechre’s music being electronic and Shane Parish’s acoustic. It is not only a matter of Autechre coming from electro and techno, while Shane’s solo music draws its roots from jazz, folk, and blues. These boundaries, between media and genres, are as permeable as one wishes. But Autechre is synonymous with difficulty, opacity, inscrutability — known for its indecipherable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and protean timbres. Even on their early albums, before they began developing the complex software systems that have marked the last quarter-century of their music, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown was exploring the limits of their machines: they drew melodies from drum sounds, programmed complex polyrhythms of extraordinary complexity, and wrote sequences that defy any attempt at deciphering. I have been listening to “Yulquen” for 31 years, and I still could not tell you exactly what is happening between the melody and the rhythm; try as I might, I am simply unable to count the steps. Take Shane, for example: one man, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Not to mention one foot to keep time when precision becomes difficult.) That is his entire arsenal. One would not imagine such an instrument suited to Autechre’s music. And yet, if there is one person capable of carrying out such a project, it is Shane. Drawing on years of experience as a professional musician in clubs and hotels around Asheville, North Carolina, where he played standards, he has spent decades arranging pieces for solo fingerstyle guitar, often original compositions written and recorded for other instruments. On his remarkable album Repertoire (2024), he tackled songs by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and even Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin, capturing their very essence and reinterpreting it in a style that is both assured and inventive. The origins of Autechre Guitar run deep. In 2025, Shane released an intimate YouTube performance of “Slip” on nylon-string guitar, recorded in his living room. But his first attempt at this piece actually dates back to 2004, when he wrote down his first rudimentary transcription of its winding melody — a 29-beat phrase that seems to glide over a 4/4 rhythm, producing a subtly unsettling effect. He returned to the piece over the years, with the vague idea of turning it into something more elaborate; eventually, after the Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin covers for Repertoire — and at the urging of his wife, a devoted Autechre fan — he decided to embark on an entire album of Autechre covers and set about notating the pieces, one by one. Deciphering the sequences. Arranging the counterpoints. Translating the nuances of tin and graphite into something that resembles a twelve-tone scale. And above all, it was a matter of finding a way to condense Autechre’s seemingly endless details so they could be played by just ten fingers without losing the soul of the piece. It was, in short, a kind of sleight of hand.