Shane Parish :: Autechre Guitar
Athens, Georgia-based guitarist, composer, improviser, interpreter, and teacher Shane Parish has been releasing an incredibly intense and brave body of solo works for the last decade. Featuring titles like “Undertaker Please Drive Slow”, “Ballad of an Unarmed Man”, and 2024’s “Repertoire”, an album that has absolutely astounded audiences around the world, Parish returns to the spiritual surface with perhaps his most esoteric effort to date, “Autechre Guitar”. A feverish fable buried deep in the fractured foothills of the Pennines mountain range, where meditative melodies and metaphysical memories stand tall above the alchemical atmosphere created by the English electronic music duo Autechre, Parish carefully translates some of the band’s earliest pieces through the galaxy of his guitar, and holds every eager ear in the room captive. On one hand, you can submit to the sonics and holy harmonies of the cosmic compositions, allowing the whispering waters of the strings to transport you to some medieval kingdom in the far east. On the other hand, listeners can marvel at the athletic ability and sophisticated skills of Parish’s blistering brilliance in creatively conquering numbers like “Bike”, “Clipper”, “Eggshell”,“Corc”, and “Lowride” from selected albums “Incunabula”, “Tri Repetae”, and “LP5” within the group’s critical catalogue. Not everyone can be a teacher, and while everyone’s a student, Parish finds the unique balance between the two roles, like the spiritual scholar he is. Wielding a worldly weapon and a calculated cannon of tonal trickery, magical melody, and impressive intensity, “Autechre Guitar” softly shatters the outer shell of the solar system, allowing a dangerous draft from deep space to chill the room with its ancient atmosphere.
“Of all the songs on the record, “Corc” took me the longest to transcribe. I spent two weeks, everyday, inching my way through, rewinding, sketching out a few more beats, rewinding, watching it take shape. Pure bliss. It is the only song on Autechre Guitar that is one-to-one between my arrangement and the original, in terms of tempo, form, and duration. It is a very conversational piece, a syncopated chattering, almost baroque in the way it feels simultaneously static and bubbling forth. It conjures memories of places we can never return to, twinkling and desolate, cutting through mundane avoidance.”
Photo: Peter Gannushkin
Back in 2024, Parish covered various numbers from the likes of Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Mingus, Aphex Twin, Eric Dolphy, and Kraftwerk on “Repertoire”, but there’s something different, something almost freaky about the compositions on this recent body of work. Maybe it’s the sheer technicality, not to say that wasn’t the case with the previous title, there are elements within the melodic marrow of this body of work that transcend time in this endless effort to achieve enlightenment within his medium. Recorded at Parish’s home in Athens, GA, in October of last year, the album captures a rare air across all ten tracks of sublime storytelling through instrumental intimacy. Initially inspired by his partner several decades ago, Parish proves you can blaze through the prophetic possibilities of bringing any genre or soundscape to life by introducing your own intellectual inventions to an already established ecosystem. “Autechre Guitar” will become a biblical blueprint for students in any class, style, or focus in no time.
