Sound recordings available for purchase. Contact: info (at) palilalia.com.
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16/4 Dublin Bello Bar
18/4 Rome Miniera
TICKETS — https://tr.ee/8z680LXQi6
PAL-095 Shane Parish 2LP/CD/DL
“Autechre Guitar”
This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.
It’s not just that Autechre’s music is electronic and Shane Parish’s is acoustic. It’s not just that Autechre come from electro and techno, while Shane’s solo guitar music is rooted in jazz, folk, and the blues. Those borders, between mediums and genres, are as porous as you want them to be. But Autechre are synonymous with difficulty, opacity, inscrutability—known for unparseable rhythms, cryptic riffs, and shapeshifting timbres. Even on their early records, before they’d begun building out the mind-bending software systems that have defined the past quarter-century of their music, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown were working at the very limits of their machines: eking melodies out of drum sounds, programming intricate polyrhythms of superhuman complexity, and writing sequences that defy attempts to decipher them. I’ve been listening to “Yulquen” for 31 years, and I still couldn’t tell you just what is happening between the melody and the beat; try as I might, I simply can’t count out the steps.
Now take Shane: one guy, one guitar, two hands. Six strings. Ten fingers. (Throw in a tapping foot for when the timekeeping gets tricky.) That’s the sum total of what he’s working with. These are not the kinds of tools you’d think would be equipped for Autechre’s music. But if anyone could take on a project like this, it’s Shane. Informed by his years spent playing standards as a working musician in supper clubs and resorts around Asheville, North Carolina, he’s been arranging music for solo fingerstyle guitar for decades—much of it material originally written for and recorded on other instruments. On his astonishing 2024 album Repertoire, he tackled songs by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and even Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin, zeroing in on the essence of each and rendering it into his own sure-footed yet exploratory style.
The origins of Autechre Guitar run deep. Last year, Shane posted a low-key nylon-string performance of “Slip,” recorded in his living room, on YouTube. But his first attempt at the song was actually way back in 2004, when he notated his first rudimentary transcription of its serpentine melody—a 29-beat phrase that seems to slip and slide over a 4/4 pulse, to subtly unsettling effect. He had returned to the song over the years, with a vague idea of eventually doing something more with it; finally, after Repertoire’s Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin covers—and with the urging of his wife, a die- hard Autechre fan—he decided to try his hand at an entire album of Autechre covers, and sat down to begin 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. And, most importantly, finding ways to distill Autechre’s seemingly limitless details in ways that could be played by just 10 fingers without losing the soul of the song. It was, in essence, a kind of sleight of hand.
The material on Autechre Guitar is drawn entirely from the 1990s—specifically, from the albums Incunabula (“Maetl,” “Eggshell,” “Bike,” “Lowride”), Amber (“Slip,” “Nine,” “Yulquen”), Tri Repetae (“Eutow,” “Clipper”), and LP5 (“Corc”). The reason is simple: That’s the melodic golden age of Autechre, when Booth and Brown were writing hooks that would go down as some of the most enduring, and emotionally satisfying, in the past three decades of electronic music.
Shane has done a remarkable job of capturing those melodies and translating them for the steel strings of his Taylor 214E-G. Anyone who knows Autechre’s “Bike,” a dreamy highlight of their debut album, will instantly recognize the melody Shane has pulled out of it, high notes drizzling down like raindrops on the windshield while octaves in the bass swish back and forth, steady as wipers.
But what I find even more fascinating are the examples where the connection isn’t so clear. Where the melody in the original song isn’t so obvious, say—like “Clipper,” with its droning pads and rigid bursts of arpeggio, or “Corc,” with its gamelan shimmer and open-ended riffs. “Eutow” is another one that stops me in my tracks every time: How on earth did Shane get from the original’s smear of supersaw pads, arcing glissando, and whipcrack electro beat to what he gives us here: a somber, Faheyesque report from the depths of solitude? Or just listen to “Nine,” whose portamento attacks he turns into pitch-bent blue notes straight out of the American South. (The album version of “Nine” is actually the original demo recording Shane made of the song; it’s the only take where he feels like he really captured the magic of that song.) Listening to Shane’s versions of these tracks, you intuit the way he’s had to reach deep inside each song, working by feel alone, to grasp its contours and come back with something that communicates its ideas, even if it sounds all but unrecognizably different.
Ultimately, Autechre Guitar works on multiple levels. It’s a celebration of Autechre’s music, shining a spotlight on the durability and flexibility of their songwriting. At the same time, it’s an invitation to listen deep inside the music, to take part as active listeners in the process of translation and interpretation. And while it hardly needs to be said, it’s an invitation to simply get lost in Shane’s astonishingly fleet playing, which takes these songs of unfathomable difficulty and makes them seem practically effortless.
–Philip Sherburne
credits
releases February 27, 2026
Shane Parish : guitar
Recorded at home by Shane Parish, Athens, GA, October 2025
Mastered by James Plotkin
Artwork and design by Bill Orcutt
Gatefold photo by Danny Piechocki at Jazz Em Agosto in Lisbon, Portugal, August 9, 2025
All music by Autechre, transcribed and arranged by Shane Parish
Thank you to my partner Courtney Chappell for introducing me to the music of Autechre a quarter century ago, for pushing me to make this record, and for providing a critical and encouraging ear while I was developing the arrangements. I dedicate this album to her. Thank you to my best friend Ian Weir for gifting me all the equipment I used to record this album. Thank you to my trusted elder, Bill Orcutt, for getting behind me all the way, and agreeing to release this record without hearing a lick, when it was just a dream. Thank you to Philip Sherburne for the words. Thank you to Sean Booth and Rob Brown of Autechre for the tunes! And thank you to the fans! XO
I’m doing two nights in March at Roulette in Brooklyn with EVERYTHING 😮 — The Guitar Quartet, Four Louies, How to Rescue Things, Corsano/Orcutt duo PLUS performances by everybody whose records I’ve released: Ava Mendoza, Chuck Roth, Cyrus Pireh, Kris Gruda & Shane Parish. Basically the last 15 years of my life. AND… there’s three new releases to be announced between now and then that we’ll be performing at the shows — loads of premieres, new work & so much merch.
It’s a different program each night, so block off your weekend. Get details and tickets now at Roulette.org
FRIDAY 3/20: https://roulette.org/event/bill-orcutt-guitar-quartet-how-to-rescue-things/
SATURDAY 3/21: https://roulette.org/event/bill-orcutt-four-louies/
PAL-094 Bill Orcutt LP/CD/DL
“Another Perfect Day”
Another Perfect Day is Bill Orcutt’s first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt’s computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year’s How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt’s first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parrish).
All of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto’s tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London’s finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double- picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin.
In other words, this may be Orcutt’s most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It’s an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player – angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass.
Another Perfect Day is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on “For the Drainers”) breaking into — a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record — soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of “A Natural Death.” Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who’s been going, what — four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it’s a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt’s playing in the first place. — TOM CARTER
Recorded by Shaun Crook at Cafe OTO, November 14, 2023. London, England
Photo by R Orcutt
PAL-093 Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt C30
“Empty Bottle”
Bill Orcutt plays the guitar, Chris Corsano plays the drums.
Recorded at the Empty Bottle, Chicago 6/23 & 6/24/2025
Thanks Tropical Fuck Storm, Ben Parrish, Jim Magas, Jim Hensley
Recorded By Jane Askew & Ken Klemaier
Pal-093 © & ℗ Palilalia 2025
PAL-091 Cyrus Pireh LP
“Thank You, Guitar”
Broadly speaking, shredders are the pro wrestlers of music, trafficking in overwrought drama but devoid of soul, the realm of finger-tappers, fretboard lubricators, and those prone to viewing music as a competitive brawl. As such, the axe-slinger of conscience steers clear of shredding behavior, albeit every-so-often dexterously running the neck to tip listeners off that, you know, they “really know how to play.” But for the typical avant-string consumer, shredding is beyond the pale.
Which brings us to Cyrus Pireh’s new Palilalia release Thank You, Guitar, his latest stab at “transcendental shred electric guitar music.” (Check out “If I Can Play Fast Enough It Will Turn into Food and Shelter” on Bandcamp for a long-form embodiment of exactly what this means). Pireh, a self-professed anarchist and presumed enemy of music-as-sport, upcycles the 32nd-note neck sprint into a mesmeric boil played and recorded with little intervening electronic trickery other than a Digitech DD5 and mysterious amp modifications.
The end result sounds like Pireh’s plugged a quarter-inch jack into each of the listener’s eardrums, a quick digital delay ping-ponging across the frontal lobes, the wet and dry signal of his 9-string axe all but indistinguishable. Indeed, Pireh views his maximalist double-handed scrabble as a mirror in which the listener might visualize all manner of details in its rapidly self-propagating tonal and rhythmic tapestry.
The title track, its hairpin turns echoing Fred Frith’s “Hello Music” — another startling LP-opener – establishes this methodology immediately. (“What Are We Doing What Could Be Done”, another Bandcamp track, taps this same ecstatic mojo). But far from languishing in razzle dazzle, each song tracks different tangential vectors, some (like “Free Palestine”) employing tape delay to smear the sounds into a muzzy, proto-psychedelic modality, with others stretching longer feedback times into unison lines reminiscent of Eno’s all-consuming Revox (albeit less pitchy). But the true mind bender of the record is “Amen Family”, its fret-tapping and string scraping reinventing the venerable amen break as an electrified freak-folk/jungle opus for fingerstyle guitar that has to be heard to be believed.
Ultimately, Thank You Guitar is a giant step forward in Palilalia’s redefinition of the solo guitar record, and one of the first truly novel things I’ve heard a guitar spit out in quite some time, milking the tension between precision and chaos, never quite veering into one or the other, but maintaining maximum engagement and brimming with action til the end. TOM CARTER
It’s the 10th anniversary of my Fake Estates imprint and to mark the occasion I’m reissuing three titles: “A Mechanical Joey,” “The Anxiety of Symmetry” & “The Four Louies.” First time reissues for anything on the label. They’ll be on Bandcamp and available for distribution (another first!) from Revolver USA beginning in May.
Also in May, I’ve got two West coast performances of “The Four Louies” — that’s LIVE shows with a twelve piece band & me on guitar. We got some of SF’s brightest lights for these premiere performances AND legend William Winant (who performed “Four Organs” in Reich’s touring ensemble back in the day) to jam maracas. Insane. Shows are Friday May 30 in Los Angeles at Zebulon (presented by Upend LA) and Saturday May 31 in San Francisco at the Lab.
PAL-090 To Live and Shave in L.A. 4LP box set
“The Wigmaker in Eighteenth- Century Williamsburg.”
Palilalia is proud to present this 25th anniversary deluxe reissue of To Live and Shave in L.A.’s “The Wigmaker in Eighteenth- Century Williamsburg.” in an expanded 4LP box set.
The four LPs contain all 27 tracks from the original “Wigmaker” double CD remastered for vinyl, including complete lyrics, original liner notes & production credits, plus an entire LP side of unreleased songs from the original 1996 version of the album.
The set also includes a 36-page perfect-bound book with never- before-seen photos, a critical appreciation by Matmos’ Drew Daniel, and a 10,000 word oral history of the five year period 1995-2000 that bandleader Tom Smith worked on Wigmaker, including interviews with the band, the label, the many guest musicians, and friends and co-conspirators like Aaron Dilloway, Jim O’Rourke and others.
It ships April 10th 2025 on what would have been Tom Smith’s 69th birthday.
A gloriously hostile masterpiece whose time has come… The product of five years of jamming, equipment mooching, couch- surfing, and marathon self-editing, the record is at once supremely out of control and structured to the tiniest detail. — Drew Daniel
An ambitious marriage of ass-shaking rock dynamics, hard disk manipulation, ‘sound on sound’ concrete architecture and industrial strength electronics… Intellectually savage — David Keenan, The Wire
A truly great album… totally convinced of its own necessity and complete in its absurdity. From the perplexing cover art to its utterly indigestible length, there is no wink or nudge to suggest this is an elaborate put-on, no window left open to the real world… 8.5 — Jason Nickey, Pitchfork
Vinyl represses of Music for Four Guitars, Odds Against Tomorrow, Four Guitars Live & How to Rescue Things are available and on the Orcutt bandcamp now. CD versions of Made Out of Sound, Music Four Guitars, Four Guitars Live & Jump on It are bandcamp too. They’re also available for mail order & distribution at Midheaven / Revolver USA.
PAL-088 Chuck Roth LP
“watergh0st songs”
Chuck Roth’s music wanders. The New York-based guitarist’s inquisitive style builds from rippling patterns that center the physicality of his instrument, roaming wherever they take him. watergh0st songs, his Palilalia debut, collects songs from the past half-decade, presenting an intimate snapshot of his music that draws from an eclectic background in classical guitar, electronic music, and improvisation.
The mark of watergh0st songs is its exploratory nature. Roth began his musical journey as a classical guitarist studying the canon works for the instrument, but he was never interested in playing fast or flashy. Instead, he wanted to roam down musical paths and see where they led him. He eventually became more interested in electronic music, where he found inspiration in subtractive properties and patterning. The music of watergh0st songs translates that electronic music to the guitar: many of the songs began as synth tones and later branched out through the physicality of his instrument.
When writing music, Roth wants melodies to feel comfortable in the body, focused less on setting a structure and more on letting music unfold how it happens in any given moment. His songs are fluid and his melodies are clear, plucked with careful attention but never too deterministically. His is the music of a traveler, floating around the strings of the guitar. It is about embracing the banal, or the everyday moments that shape a life.
Though Roth’s music often feels quite direct, there is a dreaminess that lives inside of it. His lyrics don’t feel too hot or cold, instead they have a wistfulness and melancholy of what it feels like to live through every passing day. His exploratory style bolsters these lyrics, giving the music its sense of ennui, as does his focus on texture. Each track takes on a different structure: “Bunny Hop” unfolds like a squirrel jumping from branch to branch of a tree, while “Private Boy” has a slower approach, growing from delayed harmonics that almost sound like bowed strings. His textures range from metallic and bristling to soft and feathery, evolving with gentleness. It is about ending up somewhere different than where it started, and watching the notes that fall in-between.
The embrace of the routine colors Roth’s music. In it, there is a sense of presence, of admiring the smallest details and moments. Roth loves to take walks and look around, observing the beauty of his surroundings. Similarly, watergh0st songs feels like moving through the world at the pace of a comfortable trot and soaking in every sound as it emerges. It is a quiet evolution – but one that stays. — VANESSA AGUE
