Adrift in the Rift
Shane Parish, Aleksandra Słyż and Teoniki Rożynek, Anqi Liu
The Adroit Sonic Translations of Shane Parish
Earlier this year guitarist Shane Parish released Autechre Guitar (Palilalia), an audacious follow-up to his superb 2024 solo record Repertoire, a collection of idea-dense but surprisingly breezy fingerstyle arrangements of a broad collection of tunes across the stylistic map. The veteran musician has spent years refining his acoustic playing—he first attracted notice before than with his visceral post-prog machination in Ahleuchatistas—translating a various jazz, blues, and folk tunes into compact, ultra-tuneful, multilayered solo enterprises with increasingly impressive results. But it wasn’t until Bill Orcutt enlisted him to transcribe and arrange the four-parts from his Music for Four Guitars project, which he later joined for live performances, that he began to gain a wide listenership. He did a fine job parsing Orcutt’s knotty sounds, but his talents as an arranger were never clearer than on Repertoire, where he managed to convey the ebullient polyphony of jazz tunes by the likes of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra with only ten fingers upon six strings. He also tackled a pair of electronic tunes, by Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin. Parish has a gift to untangling contrapuntal designs usually articulated by different instruments into guitar vehicles that don’t abandon the complexity in favor a clear melodic interpretation. Orcutt asked him to do it again for the recent Music in Continuous Motion.
When I heard about Autechre Guitar I was curious. Although I haven’t religiously followed the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown in some years, I have continued to respect the rigor, rhythmic invention, and relentless detail they continue to bring to their still-evolving work. Hearing them play live in Riga a couple of years only reinforced the almost impenetrable density and architectural complexity of its music. I honestly couldn’t imagine how Parish could translate it to guitar, despite his skill. Well, he didn’t actually translate it, at least the Autechre music I was carrying in my head. Most of the 10 pieces on the Parish album are pieces that appeared on the duo’s first few albums, which preceded the maniacal rhythmic jujitsu they would soon achieve. I adored the 1994 album Amber, the second Autechre record and the first I ever heard, and they quickly became my favorite electronic group, a position they maintained for years, even as I lost interest in so-called IDM. But going back to the first two albums in light of hearing Parish’s record, I was shocked by how poorly they’ve aged. I didn’t find them bad or anything, but what once sounded wildly futuristic and inventive now sounds remarkably conventional. Part of that is because Autechre has become influential and many of its ideas have been absorbed by so many subsequent musicians, but even with that in mind the music just sounds totally of its time. Naturally, music that is heavily informed by if not largely dictated by technology often can’t help but be trapped in time, but Autechre had yet to really hit on the ferocious rhythmic volatility, algorithmic intricacy, and impatience of its most enduring work. On the other hand, the older stuff is much more traditionally tuneful than what they would go on to do, and that lyric quality was grist for Parish’s arrangement mill. He doesn’t imitate those early tracks, but instead homes in on their essence and builds an entirely new scaffolding around the original melodies. To be perfectly honest, he improves them in a lot of ways. I know it’s a case of oranges and apples to compare these, but in 2026 Parish’s renditions feel more alive and timeless to me. Below you can hear his vibrant account of “Corc,” a more mysterious, inscrutable, and abstract track that originally appeared on the duo’s 1998 album LP5, the latest music that Parish tackles here. It’s among the most interesting selection of original stuff, and in a lot of ways it’s the boldest, most imaginative of the guitarist’s renderings, too. Here’s hoping for a sequel where the focus shifts to the later stuff.
Infinitely Now: Aleksandra Słyż and Teoniki Rożynek
Parish will play those Autechre arrangements this coming Saturday, May 16 at Kraftwerk when he kicks off a new 30-hour event called the Infinite Now, a co-production of Atonal Berlin and Krakow’s Unsound Festival, that revives a concept once presented as part of MaerzMusik called the Long Now. The new festival gravitates more toward experimental electronic and drone music than its predecessor, while building in sounds for a sleep concert. I have mixed feelings about the format. While I love the idea of piling up music from disparate esthetic corners, such marathon listening events in massive spaces like Kraftwerk don’t exactly encourage close listening. Still, I’m forever hopeful that if someone turns up to hear Actress or Kali Malone, they might serendipitously discover the peculiar beauty of Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski freely transforming the music of John Coltrane or catch some of the exceedingly rare Berlin appearance by Japan’s Marginal Consort.
Another potential highlight of the event is a new collaborative work between Polish musicians and composers Aleksandra Słyż and Teoniki Rożynek, who will collaborate with Microtub—the Oslo-Berlin microtonal tuba trio. Słyż has been garnering increasing attention in recent years, and while I haven’t loved everything she’s done, I admire her rigor and tenacity, as she builds new sound worlds from her electronic roots. She first made an impression on me a few years back with A Vibrant Touch (Warm Winters Ltd.), a convincing, elegant melding of three meditative, slowly unfolding works for electronics, strings, and saxophone, where steady development and motion complicated the urge to dismiss at as yet another wan entry into drone music, and nearly everything I’ve heard from since has grappled with new ways to collide more ambitious, detailed compositional interests with those electronic roots. I had never heard of Rożynek before looking into this performance, but I enjoyed checking out her 2025 album Pathopoeia/Tomba Emmanuelle (Pointless Geometry). I haven’t had a lot of time to dig in, but I’m impressed by the spatialized layering of acoustic noises made from unidentified objects and electronics. The music rarely takes expected pathways, using electronics to conjure consistently surprising textures, narratives, and shapes. Below you can hear “Pathopoeia.”
On Sunday afternoon the duo will present a new iteration of their piece “And the Sun Stood Still,” which was originally commissioned by the Ephemera Festival for the duo and a brass trio with trombone, horn, and tuba, but with the inclusion of Microtub the electronic elements—with Słyż modular synthesizers and Rożynek using electronics and objects—have been upated to reflect greater microtonal emphasis. Słyż says the piece was created “to explore textures and colors that evoke the feeling of the rising sun during the Summer Solstice.” I have no idea how the piece manifests those sensations, but given what I’ve heard from the pair, and knowing the psychoacoustic splendor Microtub is capable of generating I have high hopes.
Leading up to the Infinite Now are a handful of “prelude shows,” including one on Thursday, May 14, also at Kraftwerk, featuring Sinfonietta Cracovia, which will play what are probably the two best-known works by British composer Gavin Bryars, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1972), two minimalist landmarks that appeared together on a 1975 record released by Brian Eno’s Obscure imprint. The program is rounded out by Słyż’s Pure Voices for string orchestra and fixed electronics, a work originally commissioned by the Krakow festival Sacrum Profanum in 2023. It recently appeared on an Sinfonietta Cracovia album Sinfonietta Nova by Sinfonietta Cracovia. Polish Modern Music (Dux). The music is very much in sync with the composer’s electronics-rooted output, but here it’s the dark, glacial flow of richly striated strings that dominates, with the fixed electronics providing a kind harmonic shadow that amplifies and picks out nuances from the ensemble’s precise reading. Słyż is only 31, but the way she’s been progressing in recent years certainly marks as someone to pay close attention to.
Life in Layers: Anqi Liu
Anqi Liu, a Mongolian composer now based in Los Angeles, comes at her experimental electronic practice from a contemporary classical background, although based on the music she wrote on last year’s compelling Veiled Erosion (Kairos) she’d already veered from any sort of conventional pathway. She’s performing with two different duo projects at KM28 on Wednesday, May 13—a duo with Han Zhang called āññā, and another with singer Jessika Kenney, the fellow Californian currently in residence at the American Academy in Berlin. I first heard her music a few years ago with the piece “a window on absurd, evanescent scenes,” a simultaneously soothing and jarring work released on the now-shuttered Longform Editions, but it’s the Kairos album that captures her engagement with how composition, community, and improvisation can coalesce.
The music, composed between 2019-2022, is thorny, reveling in ambiguity, instability, and connection all at once. I have to admit that the academic liner notes by Amy Cimini, which largely focus on only one of the five works, actually made the music tougher to parse for me. “Etude for Friends,” the 2021 piece Cimini unpacks underlines the friendship quotient, which from my hearing of the music, relates to improvised music aesthetics. I can’t say how heavily notated the score is—the liner notes suggest that a lot of elusive sounds at work here are meticulously charted, as when Cimini writes, “her notation identifies discrete actions, like bow contact point or pressure, and recomibines them in microscopic gradations.” If so, there’s something about Liu’s music that feels like a contemporary iteration of post-Lachenmann music, with extended performer agency in terms of ensemble interactions and sonic nuances, all of it seemingly rooted in strong community aesthetics. I really like the album, even if I’m still struggling to get my head around it all. Below you can hear the piece “Etude for Echoes.” It’s a quartet piece with a conductor, which suggests the Liu demanded something very exacting.
From what I’ve read and seen, āññā sources it sounds from everyday objects and detritus, which in turn is heavily processed with electronics and digital manipulations, while in the duo with Kenney, Liu uses recordings of a Mongolian choor khuur—a traditional two-string fiddle that’s too precious and fragile to travel with—which are processed through a modular synth system.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
May 12: Mrs. Conception (Axel Dörner, trumpet, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Jan Roder, double bass, and Steve Heather, drums), 8 PM, Alter Schwede, Schwedenstraße 11A, 13357 Berlin
May 13: āññā; Anqi Liu & Jessika Kenney, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 14: Sinfonietta Cracovia play Gavin Bryars and Aleksandra Słyż, 8 PM, Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin
May 14: Marcos Valle, 8 PM, Heimathafen Neukölln, Karl-Marx-Straße 141, 12043 Berlin
May 14: Aki Takase, piano, and Daniel Erdmann, tenor and soprano saxophones, with Vincent von Schlippenbach, turntables, 8:30 PM, Jazz Club A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1, 10625 Berlin
May 14: Mia Dyberg Trio (Mia Dyberg, alto saxophone, Asger Thomsen, double bass, and Mark Ballyk, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 15: Limules (Xavier Charles, clarinet, Barbara Dang, piano, Anne-F Jacques, objects, Éric Normand, electric bass, and Peter Orins, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 15: VAX (Liz Kosack, synthesizer, Patrick Breiner, saxophone, and Devin Gray, drums), with Cansu Tanrikulu, vocals, electronics, and Nick Dunston, double bass,, electronics, 9 PM, West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, 10999 Berlin
May 16: James Carter, saxophones, Gerard Gibbs, Hammond B3 organ, and Alex White, drums, 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
May 16-17: The Infinite Now (Shane Parish; 7038634357; Joanne Robertson; Caterina Barbieri; Brighde Chaimbeul; Romeo Castellucci and Scott Gibbons; Paul Jebanasam: Lois Patiño and Xabier Erkizia; Kali Malone: Adam Wiltzie; Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke [installation]; Raphael Roginski; Aleksandra Słyż and Teoniki Rożynek With Microtub; Marta Salogni; Marginal Consort; Joy Guidry; Keiji Haino, guitar, electronics; Actress; 2k88, Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout; Keiji Haino, voice; Terrence Dixon, 7 PM, Berlin Atonal and Unsound, Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin
May 16: Faces & Places (Michaël Attias, alto saxophone, Florian Müller, guitar, Ben Lehman, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums), 8 PM, Alter Schwede, Schwedenstraße 11A, 13357 Berlin
May 16: VAX (Liz Kosack, synthesizer, Patrick Breiner, saxophone, and Devin Gray, drums), with Ipek Odabasi, noise, electronics, and Mat Pogo, turntables, electronics, 9 PM, West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, 10999 Berlin
May 17: Xavier Lopez, organ, plays Jukka-Pekka Kervinen; Romain C. Bertheau, organ, plays Jürg Frey; Fear of the Object (Kjell Bjørgeengen, electronics, Inga Margrete Aas, double bass, Andrea Giordano, vocals, Ingar Zach, percussion, Aimée Theriot, cello, and Romain C. Bertheau, organ), 6:30 PM, Taborkirche, Taborstraße 17, 10997 Berlin
May 17: Faces & Places (Michaël Attias, alto saxophone, Florian Müller, guitar, Jonas Westergaard, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums), 7:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
May 18: Deerhoof, 8 PM, SO36, Oranienstraße 190, 10999 Berlin
Thanks for the Anqi Liu tip, Peter. That will keep me intrigued and entertained for a while.