It is an immense privilege to welcome genius guitarist extraordinaire Shane Parish to the show. Incredibly kind and humble, he radiates an essence of calm and clarity, while seemingly pulsating with musical vibration, excitement and wisdom.
We walk through Shane's history as a player, discovering guitar and music as a teenager, and effectively dropping out of high school to work as a self-taught guitarist and musician more broadly.
His journey is truly unique (and immeasurably admirable) in that as a self-taught guitarist he learned how to read music, and actively drank from whatever wells of musical knowledge and theory he was able to access from a diverse and unexpected range of sources (shout out to Freddie Bryant). Bear in mind that only a fraction of the folks who have been on this podcast are capable of even the basic rudiments of reading (let alone transcribing) music.
And so today we have the Shane Parish we know and love who is capable of transcribing Bill Orcutt's digitally constructed compositions for four guitars (we also hear how this monumental meeting of some of the greatest minds and fingers in the world of guitar came to pass), and decoding the electronic music of Autechre to create a solo acoustic guitar album, which to my ear sounds as informed by John Renbourn as British electronica.
The conversation is seriously one for the heads, and it delves deep into conceptual frameworks for understanding and interpreting guitar playing (and things like mechanics, timbre, kinesthetic feel, dynamics, entering a trance state, etc.), composition, transcription, improvisation and performance, as well as Shane's application of philosophy, and specifically Aristotle's Poetics to inform his playing and sequencing on the album "Undertaker Please Drive Slow".
There's a lot to dive into here, and it's impossible to try and summarise the whole conversation into any kind of meaningful blurb. I cannot thank Shane enough for taking the time to talk. Seriously, do yourself a favour and listen to the whole thing - this is a conversation about guitar not to be missed.
And above all else - get out there and listen to Shane Parish!
