“Beats per minute” is not a concept that fingerstyle guitarists usually have to worry about. The world of instrumental solo acoustic guitar, rooted in the blues, modernized by John Fahey in the 1960s and carried on by practitioners such as Yasmin Williams, William Tyler and Glenn Jones, tends to move to pastoral and/or private rhythms. For his previous album, 2024’s Repertoire, Shane Parish adapted the work of Alice Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and others, bringing complex new modes to the stripped-down six string. That album also included a cover of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th,” which links it to this full-album exploration of one of Richard D. James’ foremost electronic peers, Autechre.
The 10 tracks of Autechre Guitar must have presented a bigger challenge than “Avril 14th,” a lovely, translucent piano etude that could qualify as James’ “Under the Bridge”—an immensely appealing departure from a harder standard style. Autechre has never aimed for lovely or translucent. These songs, all drawn from the duo’s ’90s albums, have a tectonic complexity, with harmonic, melodic and rhythmic layers sliding over, under and beside each other, surface tension at war with the movements of a subterranean system. Though not as abstract as Autechre’s work would become in the 21st century, it’s still plenty demanding stuff.
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Parish deals with it sensibly: by teasing out the primary melodies and presenting them in a straightforward fashion. Tracks like “Eggshell” (from 1993’s Incunabula) and “Slip” (from 1994’s Amber), make the shift easily, as their synth lines prove extremely durable, and translate well to Parish’s needling yet burly guitar tone. Parish chooses notes like a spider climbing a rock wall, with an air of delicate, single-minded determination, and he captures the toughness of Autechre’s approach while also unearthing previously hidden facets. Without the digital undertow and ominous overtones, the core of melancholy beauty that has always existed in Autechre’s music is brought closer to the surface.
Parish does have to make sacrifices, of course. Opener “Maetl,” also from Incunabula, loses more than half its length, becoming an introspective study instead of a percussive, dizzy sizzler. Closer “Clipper” sheds a similar length, its moody breakbeats rendered into a brooding blues. But even though hardcore Autechre fans and EDM heads will miss these elements, Parish always finds interesting ways to compensate, adding thorny arpeggios, twangy, nested bends or interlocked dissonances that hint, suggest, and imply the intricacies of the source material. He saves his most impressive transformations for the hardest hurdles—digital beasts like “Eutow,” (from 1995’s Tri Repetae), whose smeared tones, gooey timbres, and industrial rhythms would seem to make it an impossible candidate for acoustic guitar translation. Yet Parish does it, perversely adding about a minute to the song’s length in the process. Listen to how he uses precise slides to mimic the slipperiness of the electronics—quietly at first, and then toward the song’s meltdown climax, with great and accurate force.
The heart of the album might be “Bike,” a neon motorik groover that Parish treats as an open-hearted meditation. The original’s glossy confidence thoroughly dissolves in Parish’s rhythmic riffing and spectral harmonics. Though Autechre’s cryptic prickliness remains, without its sleek pulse and circuit-board sheen, it has a surprisingly forlorn, questioning quality that feels haunted and human. By unplugging Autechre, Parish has given their music even more power.
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