Shane Parish is a restless artist. When he’s not leading the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas or playing as one-fourth of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet (alongside fellow innovative guitarists Bill Orcutt, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza), the North Carolina-based musician is crafting unique solo albums that often turn the concept of a covers record on its head. On 2024’s Repertoire, Parish offered up stellar acoustic guitar covers of artists as disparate as Alice Coltrane, the Minutemen, Charles Mingus, and Captain Beefheart. Last year, he released Solo at Café OTO, covering John Jacob Niles and Angelo Badalamenti, among others. This time, he has his sights set on the works of one particular artist, albeit a rather unexpected one.
Autechre Guitar is a fairly self-explanatory title. The ten tracks are all interpretations of songs by the British electronic duo Autechre, performed by Parish on acoustic guitar. It seems like a tall order, but as usual, Parish is up to the task. It’s also worth noting that the compositions of Rob Brown and Sean Booth lend themselves to this kind of treatment more than you would imagine.
The project essentially began last year, when Parish posted a nylon-string performance of Autechre’s “Slip” on YouTube, recorded in his living room – although he’s been messing with the song for decades. The appearance of Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk songs gave Parish more inspiration to cover more songs in that vein (it was also suggested to him by his wife, a die-hard Autechre fan).
Sitting down with Autechre’s catalog, Parish began notating songs, one by one, “puzzling out the sequences. Arranging the counterpoints. Translating shades of pewter and graphite into something resembling a 12-tone scale,” according to the album’s liner notes. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the songs Parish ended up covering on Autechre Guitar are all from the duo’s 1990s output: Incunabula, Amber, Tri Repetae, and LP5, regarded as their melodic watershed era.
As someone not terribly familiar with Autechre’s work, I particularly enjoyed creating a playlist of the original versions of the songs covered here to make a studied A/B comparison between the source music and Parish’s final product. What’s surprising is just how tuneful those compositions really are, and how easily Parish extracts the melodies and transfers them to acoustic guitar. The heavily percussive “Maetl” is whittled down to its minor-key figure, sounding both sparse and elegant in Parish’s hands.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned “Slip” employs a gentle folk gait, aping the playful futuristic synth worlds of the original (and the field recording gives an additional – and quite literal – pastoral feel to the recording). Likewise, the busy, fluttering “Bike”, which sounds airy and uplifting on a dance floor in its original form, maintains the rich sense of melody with Parish, high and low notes interlocking with ease; not besting the original recording, but placing it in a new sonic home.
Sometimes the connection between versions is difficult to nail down. In “Clipper”, the thick layers of percussion are paired with long, sustained synth notes, more of a soundscape than a conventional composition. There are melodies in there, and Parish has found them. A lot of what makes Autechre Guitar such a rewarding listen is that Parish has discovered aspects of the original songs that may have been unnoticed under the din of sequencers and drum machines.
The liner notes proclaim that “this record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all”. Fortunately, Shane Parish thrives on conceiving projects that seem contradictory and overly challenging, yet come off as effortless and innovative.