RadATL New music

Shane Parish unveils live ‘Solo at Café OTO’ LP

Shane Parish: Solo at Cafe Oto (Red Eft Records). Cover photo by Petra Cvelbar.

Shane Parish has unveiled details for an evocative new album, titled Solo at Café OTO, due out July 1, via his own label, Red Eft Records.

Captured live in London on November 14, 2023, the album showcases Parish in full exploratory mode, performing an instrumental fingerstyle electric guitar set drawn from a deep well of British and American folk traditions. The performance took place during a sold-out evening of solo sets the night before Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet appearance at the London Jazz Festival.


The album’s first single, a rendition of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch’s “Sycamore Trees,” from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, sets the tone for a dark, drifting, and emotionally resonant album. Parish also leans into the melancholy and mysticism of folk ballads by Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, and John Jacob Niles, reinterpreting them with his own idiosyncratic voice and a minimalist rig: just a Fender Squier Telecaster plugged directly into the house amp. It’s the same guitar he used for 4 Guitars Live at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht the night before—a gift from Bill Orcutt, passed down when Parish joined the four-guitar ensemble.

Parish’s 2024 release, Repertoire (Palilalia Records) featured tight arrangements of outsider standards from various musical genres—Kraftwerk’s “Europe Endless,” Alice Coltrane’s “Journey Into Satchidananda,” Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th,” John Cage’s “Totem Ancestor”—allowing their melodies and their vital essences to take on a gently glowing body via the resonating steel strings of his guitar. With Solo at Café OTO, Parish summons a raw and intuitive performance that’s closer in spirit to 2016’s Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tzadik). Here, each melody becomes a jumping-off point for spontaneous invention, with Parish letting the songs drift, fracture, and reform as if guided by wind and water. The result is both intimate and expansive—an arresting document of a singular guitarist at the height of his expressive powers.

Click here to pre order Solo at Café OTO.

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Club Silencio: Music From The Work Of David Lynch at The Earl on Thursday, March 13

On Thursday, March 13, an ensemble of Atlanta’s finest players are gathering at the Earl to pay homage to the music heard throughout director David Lynch’s films. The cast includes Ben Davis playing tenor saxophone, T.T. Mahony on keys, Jeffrey Bützer playing guitar, Sean Zearfoss on drums, Henry Jack playing bass and baritone guitar, and Meghan Dowlen singing alongside Don Chambers and Compartmentalizationalists.

Press play below to sample their repertoire.

Club Silencio: Music From The Work Of David Lynch at The Earl on Thursday, March 13. $15 (adv). $18 (day of show). Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Music starts at 8 p.m.

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MSSV, Blood Circuits, and W8ING4UFOS play Boggs Social & Supply on Thurs., Oct. 26

MSSV: Stephen Hodges (from left), Mike Watt, and Mike Baggetta. Photo by Devin O’Brien

It’s misleading to call MSSV an experimental rock trio, as these three elder statesmen of the underground know exactly what they’re doing. Still, bass player Mike Watt, guitarist Mike Baggetta, and drummer Stephen Hodges craft a fluid, mostly-instrumental body of work that flows beyond the confines of their impressive collective resumes. Hodges has performed with the likes Tom Waits, David Lynch, Wanda Jackson, and Mavis Staples for years. Baggetta has collaborated with everyone from Bob Stagner of Chattanooga’s Shaking Ray Levis on the Triage album to legendary session drummer Jim Keltner. And, of course, Watt raised the bar high for American punk and indie rock playing bass and singing with the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and via scores of solo releases and offshoot ensembles. Together, MSSV hones in on a rhythm, a groove, or a subtle shift in sound to explore and expand upon with each new number. Their approach is part composition, part improvisation, and part file-under-some-other form of silent musical telepathy that is as sophisticated as it is undeniably catchy.

MSSV is on the road playing songs from their second studio album Human Reaction, due out Sept. 1 on Big Ego Records.

Atlanta’s noisey post-punk newcomers Blood Circuits (featuring former members of Free Masonry, Gaijin, Remuxers, Hal Al Shedad, and Car Vs. Driver) and the city’s quintessentially baroque chamber-punk balladeers W8ING4UFOS set the night in motion.

$15 (adv). $20 (door). 7 p.m. Thurs., Oct. 26. Boggs Social & Supply.

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