This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.
It’s not just 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 guitar work is rooted in jazz, folk, and the blues. Those borders between mediums and genres are as porous as you want them to be. But Autechre are synonymous with difficulty, opacity, and inscrutability - known for unparseable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and shapeshifting timbres. Even on their early records, before they began building the mind-bending software systems that have defined the past quarter-century of their music, Sean Booth and Rob Brown were already working at the limits of their machines: extracting melodies from drum sounds, programming intricate polyrhythms of superhuman complexity, and writing sequences that defy deciphering. I’ve been listening to “Yulquen” for 31 years and still couldn’t tell you exactly what is happening between the melody and the beat; try as I might, I simply can’t count out the steps.
Now take Shane: one person, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Add a tapping foot when the timekeeping gets tricky.) That’s the full extent of his tools. These are not the instruments you would expect to handle Autechre’s music. But if anyone could take on a project like this, it’s Shane. Informed by years playing standards as a working musician in supper clubs and resorts around Asheville, North Carolina, he has been arranging music for solo fingerstyle guitar for decades - much of it originally written for other instruments. On his remarkable 2024 album Repertoire, he tackled compositions by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and even Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin, distilling each to its essence and reshaping it in his assured yet exploratory style.
The origins of Autechre Guitar go back years. In 2004, Shane made his first rudimentary transcription of “Slip,” notating its serpentine 29-beat phrase that seems to slide across a steady 4/4 pulse. He returned to the piece repeatedly over the years, always sensing there was more to uncover. In 2023, he posted a quiet nylon-string performance of “Slip,” recorded in his living room. After the Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin covers on Repertoire - and encouraged by his wife, a devoted Autechre fan - he decided to attempt a full album of Autechre interpretations. One by one, he began transcribing songs, puzzling out sequences, arranging counterpoints, translating metallic shades of pewter and graphite into something playable within a twelve-tone framework. Most importantly, he found ways to distill Autechre’s seemingly infinite detail into performances achievable with ten fingers, without losing the soul of the music. It was, in essence, a kind of sleight of hand.
The material on Autechre Guitar is drawn entirely from the 1990s - specifically from Incunabula (“Maetl,” “Eggshell,” “Bike,” “Lowride”), Amber (“Slip,” “Nine,” “Yulquen”), Tri Repetae (“Eutow,” “Clipper”), and LP5 (“Corc”). The reason is simple: this was Autechre’s melodic golden age, when Booth and Brown were writing hooks that would become some of the most enduring and emotionally resonant in three decades of electronic music.
Shane captures those melodies beautifully on the steel strings of his Taylor 214E-G. Anyone familiar with “Bike,” a highlight from Autechre’s debut, will immediately recognize the cascading melody he draws out, high notes falling like rain while bass octaves move steadily beneath.
Even more fascinating are the pieces where the connection is less obvious—where the original melody is obscured within texture, as in “Clipper,” with its droning pads and rigid arpeggios, or “Corc,” with its gamelan shimmer and open-ended motifs. “Eutow” is particularly striking: how Shane transforms a swirl of supersaw pads, glissandi, and electro percussion into something somber and Fahey-esque, like a solitary report from deep within. Or “Nine,” whose portamento attacks he recasts as pitch-bent blue notes reminiscent of the American South. (The album version of “Nine” is actually Shane’s original demo; it’s the only take where he felt he fully captured its magic.) Listening to these interpretations, you sense the depth of his engagement—how he works by intuition to grasp each song’s inner shape and return with something that conveys its spirit, even when it sounds radically transformed.
Ultimately, Autechre Guitar operates on multiple levels. It is a celebration of Autechre’s songwriting, highlighting the durability and adaptability of their compositions. It is also an invitation to listen more deeply, to participate in the act of translation and reinterpretation. And above all, it is an opportunity to lose yourself in Shane’s astonishingly fluid playing, which makes music of daunting complexity feel almost effortless.
– Philip Sherburne
