Now here’s something you probably weren’t expecting to hear about this morning – an album of Autechre covers, but performed in finger-picking style on the acoustic guitar.
The album - with the Ronseal-like title of Autechre Guitar - is the brainchild of Shane Parish, a name to look out for. He’s a colleague of experimental guitarist Bill Orcutt in the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and Orcutt released his 2024 album Repertoire through his Palilalia label.
Repertoire saw Parish interpret some of the giants of 20th-century experimental and leftfield music, including John Cage, Captain Beefheart, Charles Mingus and Aphex Twin.
Indeed, it seems that his cover of Aphex’s Avril 14th (and Kraftwerk’s Europe Endless) has led on naturally onto this latest project, as he explains in a statement with accompanies Autechre Guitar.
“The seeds of this project were planted way back in 2002 when Courtney Chappell first introduced me to Autechre’s 1994 album Amber. The CD was on constant rotation in our basement apartment. It was bleak midwinter, and I sat there and slowly figured out how to play the 29-beat melody to the song Slip. I jotted down some chicken scratch tablature in a notebook and it sat on the shelf for over two decades, occasionally coming down to be tinkered with.”
He continues: “Over the course of that time, I arranged and performed hundreds of songs from different genres. In 2024, I recorded two pieces of electronic music on acoustic guitar - Europe Endless by Kraftwerk and Avril 14th by Aphex Twin - which appear on my album Repertoire.
"Engaging with these masterpieces of electronic music put the wind in my sails to pursue this much larger project of navigating the complexity of Autechre in album-length form.”
“Autechre Guitar is the result of my deep love and respect for this otherworldly music, and a desire to render its crystalline poetry as expressively as I can on the acoustic guitar.”
Orcutt is putting the album out through Palilalia again and writes on Bandcamp about the release: "Shane's been working on this one a LONG time. Transcribing music is his thing, but notating and arranging the dense soundscapes of electronic music duo Autechre for solo acoustic guitar has been his Everest."
Autechre Guitar also boasts sleevenotes by esteemed journalist and DJ Philip Sherburne who says of it: "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.”
Thankfully it does and if the idea of abstract electronica played on an acoustic tickles your fancy, head over to Parish’s Bandcamp here for more details.
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