Adult guitar is a startling anthology of twenty unreleased tracks from Noël Akchoté's first twenty-one years of recording. Adult guitar (it is twenty-one years, after all) is the first record to attempt to represent the breadth of Noël's music. The project began when Noël dumped ten hours of wonderfully heterogeneous archival recordings in the hands of David Grubbs, who served as project editor and created a number of pieces from the raw material of live recordings. The resulting collection includes a demo made at age thirteen or fourteen; an awesome four-track cassette recording of Noël slashing his way through Ornette Coleman's 'Macho Woman'; a pair of spikily discordant acoustic and electric guitar improvisations; several stellar live performances from his period of static electric guitar pieces (be sure to enjoy the punishing 'Numéro 122,' recorded full-blast at the tiny Parisian bar L'Atmosphère); and a large helping of slippery, funny, ultimately gorgeous renditions of standards by Sidney Bechet, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. There's also an excerpt of a conversation with legendary drummer Jacques Thollot. Pourquoi pas?