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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RadATL Atlanta shows

NoWordsATL 4.0 Spring Edition: A celebration of instrumental music at The Garden Club on Saturday, May 10


This Saturday, May 10, NoWordsATL 4.0 takes over the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End on Sat., May 10, from 3:30-11 p.m.

This day-long festival is a celebration of instrumental, ambient, and experimental sound exploration—sans words—delivered in an environment that thrives on thick ambiance and both visceral and cerebral responses to the music.

Catch sets from an eclectic mix of forward-thinking artists, unfolding in a space that invites immersive listening. Think synth meditations, modular abstractions, steel strings, and guitar loops stretched into infinity amid light installations and projections turning the room into an ever-shifting canvas where sound and light mingle in real time. 


The Harmonic Continuum is an afro-futurist, multi-instrumentalist foursome featuring Doc Calico, Billy Fields, Kenito Murray, and Kenny Web playing jazz, punk, psychedelic, and experimental rock.


Rasheeda Ali is a Grammy nominated flautist who recently stepped out from the shadow of performing alongside greats like Jeff Mills and Kebbi Williams expressing next level cosmic explorations of sound using flute, synth, and drum machines.

Shane Parish is a guitarist, composer, improviser, and leader of the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas. He’s also ¼ of Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and a renowned acoustic soloist. 

Melodic Monster, featuring Ben Garden, is a psychedelic rock band that blends theatrics and effects in an unforgettable live show.

Alexandria Smith is an improviser/multimedia artist, trumpeter, and a professor of music at Georgia Tech, who has performed residencies at the Stone NYC, had feature recitals on the Future of New Trumpet (FONT) Festival West, Dartmouth’s Vaughan Recital Series, the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Baja California, and Tulane University.

Spacers blend Kraut Rock and African rhythms to psychedelic effect.

Jeffrey Bützer is a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, toy piano, guitar, electric piano, chord organs, glockenspiel, melodica, banjo, and other noise makers to create a cinematic world of sound.

The Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra is a collective of experimental artists who use classical instruments, movement, and sound in spontaneous improvised compositions. Featuring Majid Ariam, Al-Yasha Ilhaam Williams, Ben Shirley, Priscilla Smith, and an evolving cast of various other artists.

$15. Doors open at 2:30 p.m. Music starts at 3:30 p.m.

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Shane Parish and Robocromp play the First Existentialist Congregation Sat., Sept. 28

Shane Parish photo by Jim Hensley.

Shane Parish returns, this time performing a solo set of acoustic numbers from his most recently released albums, 2022’s Liverpool (Tzadik) and 2024’s Repertoire (Palilalia Records).

The Athens-based guitarist is the driving force behind the math-punk mania of Ahleuchatistas, and is a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Armed only with an acoustic guitar, Parish leads an emotional, contemplative journey, where each song becomes a new canvas for his introspective artistry.

“Parish possess a seamless ability to rise above his highly evolved technical skill level as an improviser, arranger, and composer, always allowing the true beauty of the music he’s playing to shine above all else.” 

Continue reading Flagpole Magazine’s May 2024 cover story about Parish and the album titled Repertoire.


Robocromp is a duo featuring Atlanta saxophonist Jeff Crompton (also of Anagrams) and Chattanooga-based guitarist Rob Rushin. Together, they channel an eclectic blend of avant-garde jazz and experimental rock into mostly original numbers and occasional covers by Ornette Coleman, Abdullah Ibrahim, and the likes.


$15. 8 p.m. Sat., Sept. 28. First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta, 470 Candler Park Dr NE.

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