Why write a book about Atlanta record stores? The truth is that you get a singularly unique perspective on a city’s history, its culture, and its personality when viewed through the lens of a record store’s front window. I have often said that if you want to understand a society or a culture, just take a look at its pop culture, and music has always remained right there on the frontlines.
Atlanta is world-renowned as a hip-hop mecca, but a rich underground rock scene has been thriving here for decades. The hub of that world is the city’s record stores. Featuring decades-old institutions to shops that existed just long enough to leave an impact, Atlanta Record Stores is a rock-centric take on a hip-hop town, unfurling the secret history of music underdogs—outliers living among outliers—telling their stories in their native tongue. From Jarboe of SWANS to William DuVall of Alice in Chains and Neon Christ to Kelly Hogan, Gentleman Jesse Smith, Atlanta Braves organist Matthew Kaminski, and those surly characters behind the counter at Wuxtry, Wax ‘n’ Facts, Criminal, Ella Guru, Fantasyland, and more, all were drawn by the irresistible lure of vinyl records—all found their communities and their own identities, leaving an indelible mark on the culture of Atlanta.
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Hello, my name is Chad Radford and I am an Atlanta-based music journalist with 20 years of experience in writing, editing, and podcasting. Punk, hardcore, jazz, noise, post-punk, hip-hop, metal, modern composition, drone music, and all points in between are where my interests lie. I am an avid nature lover, and I buy too many records.
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For more than 40 years, Flea has remained one of the most recognizable and elastic musicians to rise from L.A.’s underground music scene. Even as the Red Hot Chili Peppers moved away from the wiry brilliance of Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik into a stretch of increasingly pedestrian albums, Flea remains driven by boundless imagination. It’s a quality that propels his curiosity to extend far beyond the familiar contours of RHCP’s repertoire. With Honora, his first offering under his own name, Flea opens up a liminal space where jazz phrasing, psychedelic haze, and cosmic drift fuse into a vast and unmoored sound.
Released by Nonesuch Records, Honora finds Flea (born Michael Balzary) stepping away from his bass while delving into the mysterious regions of jazz and psychedelia. The trumpet he wielded in such notable early ’90s numbers as RHCP’s “Pretty Little Ditty” (from Mother’s Milk) and Jane’s Addiction’s “Idiot’s Rule” (from Nothing Shocking) rings out here with subtlety and sincerity.
Honora settles into a thick flow of slow and luminous currents, as Flea follows instinct rather than flash, shaping the album’s immersive grooves and meditative reverie.
Not every experiment lands. Flea’s spoken-word and sung passages are occasionally too on the nose, tipping into a kind of earnestness that distracts from the music’s quiet strengths. But those moments are offset by an extraordinary supporting cast. Guitar player Jeff Parker brings the same understated brilliance that defines his instrumental prowess in Tortoise, and with his more recent work leading the ETA IVtet. Here, Parker is joined by two other ETA IVtet members, stand up bass player Anna Butterss and saxophone and keyboard player Josh Johnson—the latter of whom also produced the album.
Parker, Butterss, and Johnson ground Honora with depth and atmosphere, swaying between charged rhythms and billowing ambiance in songs such as “A Plea,” “Traffic Lights” (featuring Thom Yorke of Radiohead), and the album’s most profoundly psychedelic excursion, “Frailed.” Here, Flea plays bass alongside an expanded cast of characters including drummer Deantoni Parks, Warren Ellis playing viola and flute, Nathaniel Walcott on Fender Rhodes, percussionist Mauro Refosco, and fellow RHCP bandmate John Frusciante playing trumpet and providing snare drum treatments.
Nick Cave’s voice on a cover of “Wichita Lineman” settles into the song with a hushed, embered calm, turning Jimmy Webb’s wide-open meditation into something slower and more weathered, delivering the aching gravitas that only Cave can summon.
With Honora, Flea stakes his claim as the architect of his own new world, shedding expectations and following his instincts.
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The North Carolina Piedmont-based outfit Setting finds three deeply intuitive musicians—Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund—summoning rhythms and textures from deep within the Appalachian soil.
The group’s collective resume boasts contributions to projects such as Mind Over Mirrors, Califone, Pelt, Sylvan Esso, Black Twig Pickers, Acid Birds, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. In Setting, these disparate histories are distilled into a transportive sound that unfolds like an extrasensory conversation among musicians who know when to push and when to leave space in their music.
The album’s meticulous textures underscore the warmth and flow of a group that moves as a single organic unit, blending synths, banjo, zithers, cassette loops, keyboards, and hand percussion into hypnotic patterns that drift between exploration, minimalism, and ecstatic improvisation. The song “Heard a Bubble” shimmers and expands with a patient glow. “Derring-do” builds on a locomotive pulse that gathers force until it rattles the walls and lifts the roof clean off.
“Gum Bump” swirls like a weather system gathering at the horizon. Its slowly blooming pulse of harmonium, guitar, and percussion draws listeners into a meditative state. Each number builds, illustrating a singular gift for making expansive, transcendent music that blurs the lines between ritual and revelation, culminating in an immersive journey where every rhythmic turn opens onto a new horizon.
Director Morgan Maassen’s video for “What Kind of Fish is a Turtle,” offers a visual accompaniment to the song’s slowly-moving synth waves with striking detail.
For Thursday night’s show, Atlanta guitarist Mason Brown of Maserati makes a rare appearance performing under the name Brainworlds.
With Brainworlds, Brown makes music that feels like a transmission from the outer reaches of the cosmos—propelled by a motorik Krautrock drift. Each song unfolds in hypnotic layers of pulsing rhythms and spiraling synthesizers.
Brown’s immersive soundscapes provide an ideal entry point into the night’s meditative terrain.
On Monday, May 11, Athens-based guitarist, composer, and improviser Shane Parish plays two sets as part of Eyedrum’s Monday Night Creative Music Series.
The first set features Parish performing solo selections from his latest album, Autechre Guitar, a striking collection that recasts the intricate electronic structures of British duo Autechre for acoustic guitar. What seems an unlikely translation becomes, in Parish’s hands, an act of revelation—stripping away circuitry to expose the skeletal beauty of Autechre’s looping, asymmetrical phrasing and shifting repetition, rendering each number with breathtaking precision and warmth.
This kind of imaginative transformation has long defined Parish’s work. Whether fronting Ahleuchatistas or reinterpreting sea shanties on Liverpool, Shane Parish has long balanced Appalachian roots, experimental composition, and a quietly dazzling command of the guitar.
On Repertoire, he turns his attention to a wide-ranging set of compositions—from Alice Coltrane to Kraftwerk—recasting them as intricate solo guitar studies that highlight both his technical virtuosity and instinct for reinvention.
For the second set, Parish reunites with longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Libro (Michael Libramento). Libro joins Parish on drums for an improvisational duo performance, offering another glimpse into the pair’s deeply expressive approach to sound.
Like a slowly turning constellation coming into focus, Kepler’s Choice unfolds as a celestial dialogue between Robert Poss and Edward Clark Cornell, where time, tone, and texture align with sublime atmosphere.
Poss and Cornell’s pairing on Kepler’s Choice (No Sides Records) balances a stylistic overlap of their respective musical inflections. Poss is known as the guitar player and composer that led Band of Susans through the New York City rock avant-garde of the late ‘80s and mid-’90s. He has also played with Bruce Gilbert of post-punk luminaries Wire, and alongside minimalist composers Rhys Chatham and Phil Niblock. With the eight songs that make up Kepler’s Choice, Poss distills a lifetime of experiences into broad, glacial sheets of sound, where guitars, pianos, and electronic touches stretch into radiant, sustained worlds of sound.
Robert Poss (left) and Edward Clark Cornell.
Cornell is a multimedia artist who co-founded La Ponto Ensemblo with German electronic composer Hans Dieter Schmidt. On Kepler’s Choice, Cornell weaves Poss’ mammoth elements into a more intricate web of tones that flicker to life, bloom, and quietly rearrange themselves from within. This exchange is the central engine that drives Kepler’s Choice, culminating in an album that is as vast and mysterious as the cosmos itself.
It’s tempting to trace a lineage from Poss and Cornell’s work together back to minimalist luminaries Steve Reich, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. However, their bridge reaches a higher plain trodden by composers such as György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Iannis Xenakis. Cornell’s fascination with cluster chords—those dense, slowly shifting tonal masses—gives the music its inner tension. It comes through loud and clear in the album’s title track, where the initial tones accumulate almost imperceptibly. Soon, they grow, forming soft-edged walls of sound that evolve while gaining mass.
Their collaborative sensibilities reframe the album’s use of texture, minimalism and composition. Poss’ playing establishes a horizon line. Within it, Cornell introduces movement—small disruptions, subtle harmonic knots, and tones that hover just beyond the expected scale, creating entire worlds that exist out of time and place.
As immense and expansive as it all may be, there’s a story here about restraint, too. Cornell follows Poss’ emphasis on the “white keys”—a grounding in tonal simplicity—as a kind of sonic anchor, and a way of letting complexity emerge via chance, serendipity, and silence.
Elsewhere, on pieces such as “Russian Tea Room” and “Codified Betrayal,” the dynamic shifts in miniature. Sounds circulate, forming patterns that appear and dissolve while new strains of sonic texture emerge. Sustained, crystaline tones shape the music’s pacing and movements. But what defines Kepler’s Choice is the blending of Poss and Cornell’s approaches: Poss builds the environment while Cornell maps its internal systems. Together, they arrive at music that is conceptual and cosmic while remaining intensely human. By the time the music fades, Kepler’s Choice leaves behind a sense that its structures are still out there, slowly shifting, lingering in the outer regions of perception.
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The Messthetics (from left: Anthony Pirog, Joe Lally, and Brendan Canty) with James Brandon Lewis. Photo by Pat Graham
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis’ latest album, Deface the Currency (Impulse!), captures an increasingly bold and rebellious sound for the ensemble. Drop a needle on the opening number and the barreling rhythms explode with force. Drummer Brendan Canty and bass player Joe Lally have spent a lifetime honing their shared musical instincts in Fugazi. With the Messthetics, guitarist Anthony Pirog and saxophone player James Brandon Lewis elevate their collective efforts to a higher plane of consciousness, communication, and chemistry, distilling punk, hardcore, free jazz, and the avant-garde into a singularly defiant spirit.
Born from long stretches on the road and captured in a blur of first and second takes, Deface The Currency trades polish for immediacy without sacrificing precision.
Songs such as “30 Years of Knowing,” “Rules of the Game,” and “Serpent Tongue (Slight Return)” lock into grooves that are both grounded and volatile. Each song stretches, collapses, and builds again, veering from tightly coiled funk to an ecstatic squall. Pirog’s guitar fractures and refracts around Lewis’ saxophone, as both move with urgency toward chaos, but always maintain structure.
“Serpent Tongue” is the album’s grand finale, recalling moments from the Messthetics and Lewis’ previous, self-titled album. Here, everything is pushed forward by a brighter fire.
Of course, live and in the moment is when the music truly ignites.
Twenty Six years after directors Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen released the documentary film Benjamin Smoke, the story endures, capturing a ghost in the grain of Atlanta’s underground music and mythology.
Shot throughout the 1990s in Cabbagetown, the film traces the ragged, incandescent life of Benjamin (born Robert Dickerson), a poet, drag performer, and frontman for the bands Smoke and the Opal Foxx Quartet.
What unfolds is a collage of moments—equal parts beauty and abrasion. Cohen (Fugazi Instrument) and Sillen’s lens drifts through cluttered streets, dimly lit stages, and unhinged conversations, capturing a figure who existed in defiance of permanence. Benjamin’s world is one of contradictions: confrontational yet vulnerable, self-destructive yet searching, rooted in the decaying edges of a city then teetering between neglect and reinvention.
The screening also serves as a reunion of sorts for those who orbited that era. An introduction by Film Love’s Andy Ditzler and Bill Taft (Smoke, Opal Foxx Quartet, Hubcap City, W8ing4UFOS) sets the stage, followed by a post-show discussion featuring Taft along with friends and cohorts Clare Butler, Rosser Shymanski, Laurie Stevens, and Tom Zarrilli.
For anyone who remembers—or longs to understand—Atlanta in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, this event offers a chance to sit with a life lived in fleeting moments, without apology. It’s also a chance to explore the beauty and unease of a scene that refuses to stay buried.
The 21st Atlanta Documentary Film Festival returns to Synchronicity Theatre March 19–21, bringing a weekend of nonfiction storytelling that draws from the full spectrum of human experience. It’s a festival that’s hand-curated for Atlanta audiences—intimate, unvarnished, and driven by voices that linger long after the credits roll.
This year’s slate casts a wide net, pulling together films that examine identity, memory, and the fragile architecture of human connection. The centerpiece takes place on closing night with Werewolf in the Waves, the latest from director Soleil Moon Frye.
Frye is best known as the former child actress who played the title role in Punky Brewster on NBC from 1984 to 1986. More recently, Frye’s diaristic approach in Kid 90 resonated with critics and audiences alike, its unguarded intimacy doubling as a time-capsule portrait of youth, memory, and the cost of growing up in public.
With Werewolf in the Waves, Frye once again turns the camera inward, tracing her reconnection with childhood friend Seth Binzer—better known as Shifty Shellshock of the band Crazy Town—during the band’s attempted comeback tour. Shot largely on an iPhone, the film reveals a more painful narrative, as Binzer struggles with relapse. The result is an unflinching look at addiction’s pull and the emotional wreckage it leaves behind.
Frye will introduce the film’s premiere Sunday night. Afterward, she will take part in a 45-minute Q&A session.
Marc Ribot is a shape-shifting guitar player whose style dissolves the boundaries between genres as quickly as it defines them. When Ribot takes the stage at the Garden Club on Friday, March 20, expect nothing less than a musical séance performed on six strings.
Ribot’s solo work stretches across a body of stark, deeply personal recordings, ranging from interpretations like Plays the Works of Frantz Casseus to the haunted drift of Silent Movies, and his latest release, 2025’s Map of A Blue City.
Ribot’s live sets rarely settle into anything so fixed. Rather, they unfold in real time: fragments of melody, bursts of free improvisation, and ghostly echoes of everything from Haitian classical music to downtown New York noise. It’s a language that Ribot has spent decades refining alongside collaborators like Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, and John Zorn, helping shape records that are as strange as they are timeless.
That restless spirit traces back to Ribot’s early days studying under Frantz Casseus and cutting his teeth in New York’s late-’70s underground before surfacing as a defining voice in projects like John Lurie’s the Lounge Lizards. Since then, he’s become a connective thread between worlds, jumping from avant-garde jazz to roots music, film scores, and beyond.
On Friday night, Ribot will perform solo on acoustic and electric guitar, stripping everything down to instinct and possibility. It’s an all-seated, first-come affair—fitting for a night that rewards close listening. With Ribot, the only certainty is that nothing will unfold quite the way you expect, and that’s exactly the point.
Artwork for Edwin McCain’s cover of Drivin N Cryin’s ‘Rush Hour.’ By Anna Jensen.
On Friday, April 10, The Sun ATL premieres “Let’s Go Dancing: Artwork celebrating the songs of Kevn Kinney and Drivin N Cryin.” The show features a colorful and deeply personal collection of works by Anna Jensen, who transforms music and songwriting into a visual language.
Cover art for Puddles Pity Party’s single by Anna Jensen.
Running through May 23, the show draws from a sprawling series of six LPs and dozens of online singles featuring artists playing Kinney’s songs from his solo releases and his work as the lyricist and frontman with Drivin N Cryin.
Jensen conceived, curated, and produced “Let’s Go Dancing” via Tasty Good Records. She is also married to Kinney. The show features roughly 75 of her acrylic paintings, each one created as a direct response to the cover songs that appear throughout the series, performed by artists such as Abe Partridge, Amy Ray Band feat. Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls), Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish, Fang of Gore (a Gang of Four), Gordon Gano (of the Violent Femmes), Peter Buck and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), and dozens more.
The cover art for Abe Partridge’s single by Anna Jensen.
Varying in size and mood, the paintings function as emotional translations—snapshots of how a photograph, a story, a lyrical phrase, a chord change, or a simple melody lands in Jensen’s imagination.
The show is a traditional gallery presentation and a map of devotion. Each canvas is tethered to a song, and each song becomes a jumping-off point for color, gesture, and abstraction steeped in Southern punk rock imagery. The cumulative effect mirrors Kinney’s catalog: wide-ranging, deeply felt, and guided by instinct rather than rigid structure.
The six week span of the exhibition will feature live performances by some of the artists who contributed to “Let’s Go Dancing,” giving immediate life to the songs that inspired the paintings. It’s a full-circle moment—music inspiring art, art reframing music, and community binding it all together.
Check back soon for details.
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On Thursday, February 19, Plazadrome digs deep into the ’90s art-house underground with a screening of Michael Almereyda’s sleek and chilly 1994 vampire film Nadja.
The film takes shape as a soft, postmodern reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter (1936), transplanting familiar nocturnal lore—alienation, desire, and immortality—into 1990s Brooklyn.
This screening features a newly released 4K restoration (Arbelos and Grasshopper), the highest quality presentation Nadja has received yet—an ideal excuse to revisit a film that has long existed in the margins.
Before the lights go down, Videodrome’s Jordan Kady will offer a short video introduction that digs into the film’s famously fraught production history. Chief among the hurdles: the sudden departure of actor Eric Stoltz just days before shooting was set to begin, which resulted in the film’s financiers bailing on the project. Executive producer David Lynch stepped in and personally financed the film, a rare act of filmmaker solidarity.
Stylistically, Nadja is as striking as it is unconventional. Almereyda’s use of the Fisher-Price PXL2000 aka Pixelvision toy camera in select scenes gives the film a ghostly, degraded texture, nodding to the expressionist techniques of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, while firmly rooting it in the DIY aesthetics of the ’90s.
Composer Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting score adds to the film’s hypnotic pull, while the film’s soundtrack—featuring music by My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Verve, and Spacehog—anchors Nadja firmly in its era. As Kady puts it, “Almereyda once described the film as ‘sucking the blood out of all other vampire movies,’” reconstituting centuries of lore into something singularly stylish and deeply strange. Three decades later, these sensibilities still feel radical and irresistibly seductive. Nadja is a must-see on the Plaza Theater’s big screen.
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