Autechre

The premise of this quixotic tour de force admittedly sounds like a joke that went waaay too far, which certainly explains why Bill Orcutt agreed to release it on Palilalia before ever hearing a single note, as his own A Mechanical Joey occupies similarly improbable and seemingly deranged terrain. As Philip Sherburne sagely observes in his album notes, “This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.” In reality, however, Autechre Guitar is the end result of a multi-decade labor of love for Parish, as he has made a career out of challenging and unexpected covers and his wife is quite a big fan of Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s singularly inscrutable, obtuse, and time-bending techno mutations. Consequently, making an album like this one has probably always been Parish’s inexorable destiny. 

Before the album was released, I was predictably quite curious about how the hell Parish was going to pull off such a feat, yet I was also mystified about why he would even want to attempt such a thing in the first place (aside from the sheer challenge of it). Notably, Parish has covered electronic artists before, but Repertoire’s cover of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” notably singled out one of the most nakedly beautiful and melodic pieces in Richard James’ oeuvre and Autechre are definitely not an act that I associate with timeless melodies. Parish would certainly beg to differ, however, as Autechre’s melodies are the heart of this album (though few will be surprised that he chose to focus primarily on their comparatively accessible early ’90s work like Incunabula, Amber, and Tri-Repetae).

Amusingly, I read an interview earlier today in which Parish was asked if he ever wrote his own songs and I realized that such a question would have never ever occurred to me, as his past interpretations of everything from sea shanties to Alice Coltrane to John Cage have all felt like part of a very distinctive and instantly recognizable vision. Unsurprisingly, that transformative vision is even more striking than usual here: these songs may very well have been Autechre songs once, but Parish has made them so definitively his own that I doubt that even the guys from Autechre would recognize some of these pieces as rooted in their own recordings. 

Obviously, there are plenty of other nimble-fingered virtuosos in the guitar world making challenging work, yet Parish is arguably on a plane of his own when it comes to transcribing and arranging (which is how he initially wound up in Orcutt’s Music For Four Guitars quartet, incidentally). Consequently, tackling the post-human math mutations of Autechre is exactly the sort of Herculean feat that Parish was born to take on. However, there is a deeper and more intuitive genius lurking in Parish’s work as well, as being able to grasp and channel the essential essence of an impossibly complicated piece of music is a skill that few possess and that gift has never been more essential than it is here. 

As Parish noted in another interview, “putting music with a lot of moving parts on one guitar is an act of reduction,” so he had to focus on the melodies that his ears could pick up. As a result, “things that were obscure or understated suddenly have primacy on solo guitar” and Parish’s arrangements were designed to “trick the ear to fill in the blanks.” The effects of that reduction and shift in focus can be quite revelatory on some of these pieces, as some are so radically transformed that they seemed absolutely unrecognizable to me. 

For example, the most immediately striking bit of Tri-Repetae’s “Clipper” is the beat and there is absolutely no trace of it in Parish’s version. I am similarly hard pressed to hear the ghost of LP5’s “Corc” in Parish’s own interpretation, which he notes is his personal “high water mark of achievement in terms of transcription and arrangement.” I can certainly believe that, as Parish is not merely playing the same melodies on an acoustic guitar instead of a synth—he is reshaping the feel, reshaping the timbre, playing with tunings, changing keys, and (most importantly) unearthing elements that I barely noticed and re-presenting them as the beating heart of a song.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention the seemingly impossible timing challenges that Parish inventively managed to overcome, as he notes that he has been wrestling with “Slip” since 2004 (a “29-beat phrase that seems to slip and slide over a 4/4 pulse”) and further reveals that he has been listening to “Yulquen” for more than three decades and still cannot decipher the relationship between the melody and the beat.

Notably, I am a casual Autechre fan who has rarely revisited Incunabula and Amber much after their original release so I am coming at this album more as a Shane Parish fan. Experienced purely from that standpoint, Autechre Guitar is a solid release, but albums like Repertoire and Liverpool are much stronger because they have considerably more robust (or at least more conventional) melodies as their starting points. 

That said, Autechre Guitar still feels like a landmark release because it is such a rewardingly layered experience: the deeper one digs into the actual mechanics of Parish’s achievement, the more fascinating it becomes. Obviously, devout Autechre fans will likely be particularly fascinated by these transformations, but anyone who has ever been serious about guitar playing will find some of these arrangements to be an absolutely revelatory window into the instrument’s untapped potential. In fact, this album favorably reminds me of Ben Chasny’s card-based hexadic approach to composition or Jules Reidy’s just intonation tuning, as the sheer otherness of the source material inherently prevents Parish from ever reverting to familiar chords, patterns, and structures.  

To my ears, the opening “Maetl” is one of Parish’s most beautifully crafted creations, as he repurposes the understated synth melody of Autechre’s six-minute original into two perfect minutes of chiming circular arpeggios, tumbling pull-off melodies, eerie harmonies, and convulsive, finger-knotting flourishes. The following “Eggshell” is yet another highlight, as the descending minor key hook is absolutely gorgeous when it comes in and there are plenty of idiosyncratic emphases, twangs, and hesitations to keep it feeling dynamically alive and spontaneous throughout the other sections. Elsewhere, “Lowride” is another highlight, as it features another strong melodic hook and sometimes sounds like it could be an avant-garde twist on an old jazz standard. I also loved that the album’s final seconds are an insistently repeating note that feels like an error message suggesting that Parish’s brain finally broke and his fingers are now tied uselessly in knots from Autechre’s fiendish time puzzles. 

Weirdly, the album that kept popping into my head again and again while listening to Autechre Guitar was Sleep’s legendary/infamous Dopesmoker: a sludgy, slow-motion hour-long epic about a caravan of weed-priests making a bad-ass pilgrimage to the land of riffs. In short, an album so audaciously batshit crazy that their label refused to release it—an experience that frustrated and demoralized the band so much that it actually caused their breakup. Despite that, damn near anyone who heard about that monolithic weed-themed folly absolutely needed to hear it IMMEDIATELY and many were pleasantly surprised to discover that it was actually a wildly ambitious vision masterfully executed. Needless to say, it has since become an absolutely iconic album in some circles and I expect Autechre Guitar will have a similarly bright future, as a hell of a lot of people are suddenly very interested in Shane Parish’s career and this album is extremely unlikely to disappoint them.

Listen here.