On paper alone, Autechre Guitar is a fascinating endeavor. Take a visionary duo inspired by hip-hop and renowned for ceding control to their software and performing in total darkness, who have inspired haywire mutations of electronic music that seek to dissolve any remaining boundaries between our emotions and the machines we use to express them. Boil it down to just one musician and an acoustic guitar to reveal the durability of this cryptic, futuristic sound. In the midst of an ever-expanding discography that swerves from jazz and avant-garde to folk and blues, free improv and studious composition and attention-grabbing covers, Shane Parish is the perfect artist to take it on: a master’s thesis after years of intense field work.
If all that Parish accomplished with Autechre Guitar was a cerebral exercise, it would still be worthy of attention. But the questions he raises about genre and method and technology dissolve as you listen to the 10 tracks. Selecting entirely from Autechre’s melodic work of the 1990s, the Athens, Georgia-based guitarist pulls a common thread from their more beautiful moments, the elements that speak directly to the heart. A self-taught guitarist, Parish compares himself to a “wounded healer,” a virtuoso whose authority comes from his openness to failure. And unlike comparable recent album of guitar arrangements—like Jonathan Bockelmann’s dazzling Sakamoto on Guitar, which showcased the breadth and mutability of its namesake’s imposing ouvre—Parish burrows entirely into his own quiet corners of these songs, crafting something cohesive and distinct within his body of work.
The way Parish tells it, he’s spent years messing with an arrangement of “Slip,” Autechre’s 1994 classic, notable for its unpredictable sense of timing. In an academic sense, you can see why he’d return to it—just counting out its rhythm is enough of a challenge, let alone rebuilding its texture and overlaying a melodic lead. Playing on nylon-string guitar, he slows the tempo and fingerpicks with a hypnotic sense of calm: a serene, new-age quality that feels like an inversion of the group’s sensory-deprivation space husk. Often, this is the environment Parish conjures: I think of Neil Young’s haunted pastoral score for Dead Man, or the scene-setting Americana of John Fahey’s more traditional records. In other words, Parish never aims to replicate the complexity of these Autechre recordings—he’s too busy carving his own landscape within them.
It’s not necessary to know the originals to enjoy his interpretations, but it allows you to appreciate them more. There are no obvious overdubs, and his guitar is presented clean and without effects, so he mostly concerns himself with transcribing the melodic lines in surprisingly pleasant ways. In the original version of “Yulquen,” the high, ping-ponging synths already sound a little like the harmonics high up on the neck of a guitar. But for his rendition, Parish builds a steady, riding tension on the lowest string, translating the higher melody into something more like a metal riff. And in a delicate performance of 1998’s “Corc”—the most recent inclusion, from a period when Autechre were growing frustrated with the formulaic boundaries of electronica—he replicates their restlessness with contemplative pauses between movements, the patient sound of his own mind at work.
Often, more than the melodies, these are the qualities of Parish’s performances that stick with me—the tenderness he draws from a group often defined by its obliqueness. It did not surprise me to learn, upon reading the credits on the back cover, that Parish has a personal relationship with this music: He was introduced to Autechre by his wife, a devoted fan who has been urging him to attempt this project for decades. It makes sense that an album like this would crystallize over a long period of time, giving him space to understand and internalize the music before finding his way around it. Still, in these performances, you can hear the glimmer of so many fans’ first brush with the songs that go on to give their lives meaning. And in reality, this obsession is not so different from the machine learning vision quests that Autechre have spent their career exploring. At our core, we’re asking the same questions: What is this strange new place, and why does it feel like home?
