Palilalia Records

PAL-097 Olaf Rupp 2LP/DL “Fuzzy Logic”

German guitarist Olaf Rupp fuses elements of traditional flamenco (rasgueados, arpeggios, picados) with the fractured cadences of Derek Bailey, melting them together with a blast-furnace tone recalling John Lee Hooker's most blown-out extremes. And yet, despite decades of releases on FMP and Emanem, often with marquee-grabbing collaborators like Butch Morris, Tristan Honsinger, and Lol Coxhill, Rupp's music is largely unknown outside of European free improvisational circles, and (until now) has never been presented on vinyl.

Over the four sides of his first double LP, Rupp sounds sometimes like Guitar Solos-era Fred Frith musing on Jandek, sometimes like Carlos Montoya essaying the music of Cecil Taylor. Fuzzy Logic veers from unadorned yet forceful exclamations into torrents of austere, alien gestures packed with modal angst (a rarity in the capital-I Improvisation world), rewarding careful listening with previously unexplored microlandscapes of impossibly interlocked waveforms.

Regarding the album's unique sound, Rupp writes, "Echtzeitmusik-people" -- referring to the most strident non-idiomists of the Berlin improv scene -- "will once again nag at all those minor chords and the indie rock fans will shake their heads in vain looking for the beat. But unrootedness is also a power, a gift, a way."

Indeed, Fuzzy Logic is powerfully unrooted. But most strikingly, it tracks Rupp's autodidactic turn into the fraught world of effects pedals. These days, soldering-iron jockeys produce an absurd array of signal processing tools, from bit crushers to tone benders, lo-fi loopers to 24-bit digital arpeggiators, all designed ostensibly as creative tools but more often marketed towards lazy players plying YouTube gear demos rather than pushing their boxes past the limits.

Fuzzy Logic, rather, beelines to the tone-smearing outer limits of overdrive, eschewing the well-trodden paths of wail, feedback and sustain to produce a rainbow spray of strange overtones, self-oscillation, and whispered notes beyond the reach of human touch. Tracks like Hundsrück Forest throw the electronics into sharp relief, subtly blending frozen hisses into a larger grid of crackling overtones before bursting into insistent atonal repetition.

Powered by a small amp driven by an attenuator which allows maximum blow-out tone at low volumes (combined with a subtly-coaxed sound-stretcher and loop pedal), Rupp amplifies mercurial sonic details into liminal territories typically unexplored by players chained strictly to skin-on-strings. In tandem with the tech, Rupp's singular finger-charge remains. For Rupp, a cluster of fast-moving notes should be considered "one agglomerated sound in motion… using spectralistic fields of tones." Accordingly, every track is packed with motion and color.

In a way, Fuzzy Logic echoes Palilalia's previous forays into the exquisitely fried spectrum of electric guitar exemplified by some of Bill Orcutt's records, but more pointedly by Cyrus Pitreh's jaw-dropping explorations of speed-runs skittering through grainy distortion. But unlike Pitreh, and unlike anyone else you'll likely conjure up, Rupp's work (despite its virtuosity) taps a primal throb dripping with eldritch and unspeakable menace, that punches through the buttery intellect to throttle the brain stem -- particularly at top volume, which is exactly how you should bathe in Fuzzy Logic to fully experience its torrential majesty. — TOM CARTER

1. Insolent Coagulation 2. Hundsrück Forest 3. Drizzly Muddy Trail 4. Old Fiend Monsters 5. Fuzzy Logic 6. Nagging Blue Skies 7. Unweaveringly So

Played, recorded, mixed and mastered and cover artwork by Olaf Rupp.

PAL-096 Bill Orcutt LP/CD/DL “Music in Continuous Motion”

Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry into his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor -- but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify — each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a- half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.

Based on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious (The Four Louies, How to Rescue Things); with others, it’s intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue (“This is a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” Orcutt helpfully offered for Music for Four Guitars). Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on Music in Continuous Motion -- “The mystery of how [the] same person, same process, same gear produces different results." When pressed, he elaborated that the record features “no triplets,” something I’ve yet to count out to determine for myself.

Whatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms -- but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space: “Because sharp also smooth,” “And warm to the touch,” “Now nearly gone,” “Yet always moving,” “Impossible to reach.” Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places Music in Continuous Motion in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability. — TOM CARTER

1) Giving unknown origin 2) Unexpectedly heavy 3) Reflective, silent 4) Because sharp also smooth 5) And warm to the touch 6) Now nearly gone 7) Unfinished not fragile 8) Yet always moving 9) Impossible to reach 10) Is left alone 11) Barely there 12) Or difficult to see

Bill Orcutt: 4 Guitars Mastered By: James Plotkin Photo By : Laurent Orseau Recorded Oct & Nov 2025 at the Living Room, SF, CA

9/4 Barcelona Casa Montjuïc 10/4 Lisbon Zdbs 11/4 Braga gnration 12/4 Bristol The Cube 13/4 London Bush Hall 14/4 Glasgow Glad Cafe 15/4 Belfast Sonorities Festival 16/4 Dublin Bello Bar 18/4 Rome Miniera

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

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/

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

Some Hidden Purpose / O Platitudes

The Life of Jesus

A Natural Death

The World Without Me

For the Drainers

Recorded by Shaun Crook at Cafe OTO, November 14, 2023. London, England

PAL-093 Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt C30

“Empty Bottle”

Busting up the blues 04:44

O Platitudes 06:52

Bad air 02:33

The world without me 04:54

We call it a river 07:28

Mop up 04:09

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-091 Cyrus Pireh LP

“Thank You, Guitar”

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.

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

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.

PAL-079 Bill Orcutt LP

"How to Rescue Things"

Charlie Parker's first album with a string section landed in 1950, ten years after his debut recordings. Although the overtly lush arrangements of Charlie Parker with Strings were Parker's idea, the record must've been something of a relief to producer Norman Granz, especially when the sides went on to become Bird's best- seller, by a long shot. The record (and its follow-up) sparked something of a jazz-strings virus, infecting Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, and (later) Miles and Trane. And while the latter entries in that list were clearly bending their arrangements into space-age forms (and the arrangers -- Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy -- were becoming much hipper), these ubiquitous strings albums established a jazz cliché of sorts. They were a shot for the charts at worst, an attempted reinvigoration of tired easy- listening ear candy at best.

How to Rescue Things, landing 15 years into Bill Orcutt's “rediscovery” years, marks a somewhat tardy entry into the string- sweetening sweepstakes. In a post-chart, post-irony world, no one is going to mistake this as a bid for mainstream ears — nor are too many pop-gobblers going to paste this into their “Chillax” playlist. With loops of dulcet, birdsong choruses, syrupy strings, and plucked harps clipped from an RCA easy-listening disc, the zombie strings conjure not red leather couches, cotton slankets, and yuzu martinis, but rather a clockwork mortuary, an undead Who-ville and a cigarette butt drowned in bottom-shelf scotch. In contrast to Orcutt's previous reanimation of yesterday's hit parade,

How to Rescue Things instead takes as its foundation the oily underbelly of the American songbook, the relentless gears that churn melody into newly consumable and marketable forms — simultaneously ersatz, soothing, and funereal.

It's easy to use saccharine, easy-listening settings to deconstruct the romanticism of the past. Yet How to Rescue Things is not an ironic record. True to its title, the transparently corny strings serve not as a meditation on cultural vacuity, but as an attempt to rehabilitate the clichés of the past, “rescuing” them as improvisational grist for new melodic content. They serve as a harmonic substrate for some of Orcutt's most complex playing, and free him to explore the solo-as-such without the need to imply an underlying tune (unlike Orcutt's previous acoustic explorations of nostalgic song).

Orcutt's razor-sharp Fender slices through the satiny settings in angular and unexpected ways, particularly in the final tracks “Requiem in Dust” and “The Wild Psalms,” where his double picking swerves into almost Sharrock-ian territory. But ultimately, true to the Parker records that started this whole trope in the first place, Orcutt sticks to a complex yet tonal path throughout, imbuing tracks like “Not Reconciled” (with its crooned “Oh my god” and a cheeky “amen” tacked to the end) with wide-eyed romantic optimism that goes down strange in a deathbed ballad. But ultimately, it's not strange at all. Rather, this palliative track celebrates a necessary, death-defying joy in the face of darkness — whether genuine or performative is unimportant. And what's more genuinely American than whistling past the graveyard? Just ask Judy Garland. — TOM CARTER

Sanctuary 3:42

Not Reconciled 5:33

How to Rescue Things 4:56

Old Hamlet 3:24

Pylon Pylon! 3:21

Requiem in Dust 3:44

PAL-087 Ava Mendoza LP/CD

"The Circular Train"

Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley, Ethan Miller Trio

PAL-081 Shane Parish LP

“Repertoire”