"Imagine: It’s sometime in the back half of the 19th century, America. You’re sitting in the parlor of your mansion, or in the only room of your shack; things are dusty and smell like sweat and hair, no matter how wealthy you may be. You don’t own a phonograph, and you don’t know who Tony Hawk is, but you have an inkling of how good the word “shred” is going to feel when it enters the local slang. Suddenly, a tall, elegant figure with beautifully maintained fingernails emerges from some corner of the room, carrying a guitar. He says in a soft voice, “I have a transmission for you, from the coming few centuries. Would you like to hear it? I figured you wouldn’t have a dongle, so I brought my guitar.”

You may be apprehensive, but you shouldn’t be. Shane happens to be an internationally renowned virtuoso of the guitar. Specifically, he’s the kind of virtuoso who is as deep on style as he is on technique. His technical prowess is almost maddeningly complete; aiming paradoxically for the yards-long target called “breadth” he’s somehow hit all of it, 500 arrows piercing every pore of the landscape. He has that much technique not for the sake of guitar worship but to best bring the music forth clearly and in his own hand, like a pearl formed in a specific sea. I know this because I’ve sat next to him in multiple countries and American states and seen him deliver transmissions of that extreme honesty, with that extreme capability.

Like Derek Bailey’s “Ballads,” this record brings you into the room and the breath of a true musician whose mastery does not overshadow his appreciation of the music that inspired it. The title, “Repertoire,” underscores the beautiful songs he chose to perform, all standards of 20th century musical excellence. The in-time persistence of his blues-walked “Lonely Woman.” The grand registral descent he performs on “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” like a rare document of the trip down from Everest. Dig how “Better Get Hit in Your Soul,” emphasizes the folk blues water coursing through Mingus’s Ellingtonia, how Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14” and the Minutemen’s “Cohesion” sound so much older than Cage’s “Totem Ancestors.” “Repertoire” puts forth the idea that time is arrangement: time and arrangement are each only as successful as they are faithful to their origins and expansive in their style.

Again, lest you fear the alien smoothness some associate with the concept “virtuoso,” remember here we’re dealing with a time- traveler. His virtuosity is home grown, born of human work rather than some abstract or divine touch; the aim is not to go beyond the realm of human technical possibility but to expand it in the direction of human, meaning, timely. This guy can play anything, and for you, for this record, which sounds intimate and as present as a transmission from a time-traveler, he chooses to.

— Wendy Eisenberg"

Palilalia, 2024