Autechre Guitar

Description

Strictly speaking, this album shouldn’t even exist. It’s not simply the fact that Autechre’s music is electronic and Shane Parish’s is acoustic. It’s not just that Autechre come from electro and techno, while Shane’s solo music draws its roots from jazz, folk, and blues. These boundaries, between mediums and genres, are as permeable as we care to make them. But Autechre is synonymous with difficulty, with opacity, with inscrutability – known for their indecipherable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and protean timbres. Even on their earliest albums, before they began developing the complex software systems that marked the last quarter-century of their music, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown were exploring the limits of their machines: they extracted melodies from drum sounds, programmed complex polyrhythms of uncommon intricacy, and wrote sequences that defy all attempts at deciphering. I have listened to “Yulquen” for 31 years, and I still couldn’t tell you what exactly is happening between the melody and rhythm; try as I might, I am simply unable to count the steps. Consider Shane: one man, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Not to mention a foot to tap the beat when precision becomes difficult.) This is his entire arsenal. You wouldn't imagine such an instrument suited to Autechre’s music. And yet, if anyone can pull off such a project, it's Shane. With years of experience as a professional musician playing standards in clubs and hotels in the Asheville, North Carolina area, he has decades of experience arranging tunes 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 the very essence and reinterpreting it in a style that is both self-assured and innovative. The origins of Autechre Guitar run deep. In 2025, Shane released an intimate nylon-guitar performance of “Slip” on YouTube, recorded in his living room. But his first attempt with that piece actually dates back to 2004, when he noted his first rudimentary transcription of its sinuous melody – a 29-beat phrase that seems to slip over a 4/4 rhythm, producing a subtly unsettling effect. He returned to the piece over the years, with the vague idea of doing something more elaborate with it; finally, after the Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin covers for Repertoire – and at the urging of his wife, a dedicated 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 resembling a dodecaphonic scale. And most importantly, it was about finding a way to condense Autechre’s seemingly infinite details so that 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.