"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
