Tag Archives: blog

ACQUIRED: Drone Not Drones 2026 T-Shirt

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Recently received the new 2026 DRONE NOT DRONES t-shirt. According to their site: “ALL PROFITS [GO] TO MINNEAPOLIS legal/rent/resources MUTUAL AID orgs in response to the DHS armed occupation of our city.” That city being Minneapolis and surrounding area. Abolish ICE.

I’ve played at the 28-hour drone festival a couple times over the years. It’s an extraordinary occurrence featuring dozens of participants taking turns playing a small part of one unbroken performance across two days. Recordings of my own sets from 2014 and 2017 are available in THE ENDLESS COMPENDIUM.

LISTENING: Shane Parish – AUTECHRE GUITAR

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LP copy of the album on a wood floor. The art is a solid white background with a smaller solid gold/brown square centered in the middle with smaller text SHANE PARISH in the upper left corner and AUTECHRE GUITAR in the upper right.

The first time I heard about the album AUTECHRE GUITAR was also the first time I heard about its creator, Shane Parish. This was not a surprise considering I’m not exactly a “guitar guy,” much less a solo acoustic finger-picking style “guitar guy.” I am slightly more familiar with the work of Autechre, and the sheer audacity of the concept made me very excited to hear the result. Interpreting the duo’s challengingly slippery tones and chaotic machine music with nothing more than a single guitar and ten fingers made this my most anticipated album of the year.

In short: it’s mesmerizing. You certainly do not need to be familiar with the source material to quickly understand that Parish is not only a master of the instrument but also incredibly clever with the arrangement. Early copy for the album included the line “This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.” That’s true, but it does, and we are better off for it.

Two notes:

  1. “Slip” contains the ambient sounds of birds chirping and a plane flying past, sounding so much like my own home recording environment that the cognitive dissonance had me questioning what I was hearing.
  2. Parish previously recorded a cover of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th,” a song I have been waking up to every weekday morning for the past 20 years or so. His interpretation is beautiful.