Tone Glow 214: Shane Parish
The second in a series of five interviews with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Shane Parish talks about his childhood mentors, teaching philosophies, and his new album 'Autechre Guitar' (2026)
All week, Tone Glow is hosting five different interviews in celebration of Bill Orcutt’s residency at Roulette and new album Music in Continuous Motion. The series will feature individual interviews with all four members of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and conclude with a group interview. The other interviews can be found here: Bill Orcutt, Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg, and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet.
Shane Parish
Shane Parish (b. 1978) is a Florida-born, Georgia-based guitarist who has spent the past 30+ years making music. He’s been in multiple bands, most notably the proggy math-rock trio Ahleuchatistas and the improvisatory folk group Library of Babel. Parish has collaborated with numerous artists over the years—from Tashi Dorji to Wendy Eisenberg, Tatsuya Nakatani to John Fernandes—and has released several solo albums, including Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016), Repertoire (2024), and his latest LP, Autechre Guitar (2026). Parish is also part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, who will perform this Friday at Roulette. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Parish on February 21st, 2026 to discuss his childhood mentors, the writings of Bruce Lee, and the making of his new album. Also: Parish lists his favorite South American musicians.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know that when you became a father, you stopped gigging as much and started teaching. What do you feel like you’ve learned about yourself as a result of being a father? What have you been surprised by?
Shane Parish: Wow. Well… so much. I’ve learned how to slow down and be present. Becoming a father was, really, a decision—it was important to me that I became an active participant in this. I didn’t want to be out at the club or a dive bar gigging all the time. The things that I experienced growing up… I wanted to be a cycle breaker. I didn’t want to yell at my kid, I didn’t want to hit my kid, I didn’t want to neglect my kid. I didn’t want any of these things that could happen when one’s goal isn’t to give the best to their child. I was 36 or so by the time I had my daughter, and I’d already been to therapy and examined some of the things I would’ve repeated had I been in my 20s, or at an earlier part of my career; I would’ve been struggling to get my footing while having the responsibility of a child. I slowed down and watched them grow, watched them make their own choices instead of imposing things or penalizing them. I want to honor my child and say that I also learned the greatest love of all. I learned that there are things more important than everything else in my life.
As far as things I learned for myself, I pivoted towards having a lot less time to focus on my craft but being way more productive in that time. Previously, I’d spend all day tinkering with something, but the results weren’t as great as now, when I work 30 minutes very productively. It felt good to better manage my time. Fortunately, I still have a lot of time to do what I want because I’ve stayed in this realm—of gigging, teaching guitar, and recording. It’s still my job, and while I sometimes wonder if I should’ve done something else, it would’ve been a lot harder to record Autechre Guitar (2026) or transcribe Bill Orcutt’s record [Music in Continuous Motion (2026)] if that were the case. These things take a lot of time.
You’re talking about how your daughter taught you about the greatest love of all, and I’m wondering what qualities you see in her that are both similar and different to who you are.
One of the things I see in her is this earnest enthusiasm, the kind that society can strangle out of you. There’s also a real ability to foresee an outcome, and maybe this is different from me. When we’re reading a story or watching something, she’ll know exactly what’s going to happen, very early on. Any clue that’s present, she has this hyperawareness. She also has a deep emotional intelligence. While I don’t think that’s different from me, it wasn’t allowed to flourish in the environment I grew up in. That sensitivity and care, and being able to anticipate needs or outcomes, is super sharp. And she’s a lot more athletic than I was as a kid. I’m athletic now, but as a kid… no (laughter).
You’ve just described your daughter, but now I’m wondering about yourself. Who was Shane as a child? I know you got a guitar when you were a teenager and had a band called Union Prayer Book.
I got a guitar when I was a freshman in high school. I immediately wrote a song when I got it called “Home”—I could play the riff for you right now (laughter). The lyrics were like, “I am by myself, I am alone/I am in Hell, I am at home/Dead stares at the bare white wall…”—something like that. I was a troubled youth, and I would write lyrics and poetry. At one point I decided that I was gonna drop out of school, make music, smoke marijuana and take LSD, and that’s it—I’d left this domain and went into a musical realm. It was a form of escapism, but also a lifestyle I chose to lead. It wasn’t quite time to do that, though, and it became a thing of, “Oh, we have to institutionalize this person.” I became someone that needed to be “controlled” because I was going down a wayward path, but here I am now—I don’t feel so different from the person who was making those choices.
My decisions were a response to the chaos in my home, and the guitar became a form of moving into another timeline. I still had the encroachment of living in the parents’ home, of school administrators and police and the state and medical professionals, but I was having the time of my life, honestly. I had music, I had my guitar, I had people coming in and out of my life who were playing music, we were renting a warehouse and playing all night long, we were going to these open mic nights, we were having wild psychedelic adventures in South Florida on dangerous interstate highways.
Was it an easy decision to pursue music then?
It was all-in immediately, but it’s strange because I didn’t have an academic support structure—there were no guitar lessons, and it’s not like I was gonna go to music school. I’m happy that things went the way they did, and it’s only because I had mentoring moments with great musicians in the area. I would see this guy named Michael Bianco, who was a Stanley Jordan-type, finger-tapping, jazz-fusion guitar player. He had a regular gig at the Now Art Cafe in Hollywood, Florida. I’d go there to see him all the time. I’d pick his brain, asking him theory questions, and I also had his phone number. This was pre-cell phone, so I would call his landline, like, “Hey, I don’t understand what a minor 7th flat 5 chord is… it’s a half-diminished chord?” He’d try to explain it to me. I wanted to grapple with theory and harmony and understand jazz.
The thing is, this is a lifelong pursuit, and I didn’t have the resources to understand it in a digestible format. I didn’t have David Berkman’s The Jazz Harmony Book (2013), which is so conversational. I didn’t have those fundamentals and foundations. But it didn’t matter to make music, right? All you needed was this feeling, to care about music and to love it. I always wanted to do something different and creative, and I didn’t want to do what was popular. I remember auditioning this keyboardist for Union Prayer Book, who was gonna go on to law school and become a judge. I told him, “We’re not really into girls and partying, we’re serious about the music.” I remember him saying, “Uhh, I kind of wanna get girls.” (laughter). But that was my MO at the time—music was the most important thing.
Another mentor was Dr. Lonnie Smith, the organist, and his drummer Danny Berger. They would have regular gigs at downtown Fort Lauderdale. Seeing those guys play bebop… it’s like they were passing magic around on stage with how they communicated in their improvisation. Me and my friends were too young to go to this club, but they loved us being at the front and just freaking out while everyone else was drinking and talking. They told the bouncers we could come in because they really wanted that energy. I would have conversations with those guys, like, “How do you balance dating and being a musician?” (laughter).
Do you remember what he said? It’s a good question.
I do! Dr. Lonnie Smith was like, “You gotta find someone who really supports what you’re doing. I’m playing music and this is my life, and if you have a conflict there, it’s just not gonna work.” He said it in some funnier way though, like, “Me and the guys are down in the basement playing music, so fuck that!” (laughter). But it was very much this idea that you need to find your soulmate, someone who totally gets it.
Danny Berger is an amazing drummer. He had a very Frank Sinatra attitude—just very confident and cocky, a badass old guy. We’d go to his apartment in Las Olas Boulevard to hang out after shows. I remember me and my friends going in there once, and I brought a cassette with music that me and my friends had made. I wasn’t very confident about it. People were saying it was good, but I was apologizing. “Sorry, this is bad, it’s whatever.” He said, “No, you listen to me—if someone gives me a compliment, you know what I say? ‘Yeah, I kick ass!’” (laughter). It was just really funny because I couldn’t believe he said that, and he did it in this really bravado way, but it actually helped. Like, don’t convince someone that they don’t like what you made when they already said they did. You don’t have to go on and on about the things that went wrong, you can just say thank you. That’s really important with performance.
You’ve talked about how the guitar was a path towards escapism, but it was really a way for you to understand who you are. Do you know when you started realizing that?
This goes back to what I said earlier, about feeling like the same person I was back then. It’s like, oh, I was right about everything (laughter). There was a guidance counselor, and I told her I was going to quit school—I had gone to six different high schools—and play music instead. She said, “You seem like you really know what you’re doing, you should do this.” She understood I was basically going to be a tradesman. It’s still a job to transcribe and play music at weddings and stuff—it’s not this vague concept. And while I had some delusions about being a huge rock star, this was something I wanted to work hard at and pursue. That was a little moment, but I felt like I was being heard, that something was being reflected. When you’re in a desert for affirmation, it feels incredible when someone sees you.
I’ve been teaching for 18 or 20 years, and I’ve ended up having these years-long relationships with my students. I’m not trying to sound grandiose, but there’s a part of me that’s like “the wounded healer”—I went through that shit, and now I want to pay it forward. And on the musical side of things, I didn’t have the knowledge or technique to actually participate in specific idioms or traditional musical communities, so I had to find my own way. Seeing the struggles that come to me from my students, who are at all levels—some people have played for decades, some have just started—I know what it’s like to operate with suboptimal mechanics, or how to navigate the confusion behind specific concepts. I’m gonna keep trying to find the simplest solution, but that’s only because I went through these circuitous routes.
What sort of things do you emphasize when you teach?
My biggest guiding philosophy is that teaching is learning. There’s this idea from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) where he says that we’re not depositing information; we’re having a conversation about something that we’re both mutually interested in. It took me a few years of teaching to understand this. I remember the day that I let go of being responsible for what someone learned. I thought that I had to perform for the parents of these students and produce results. I remember going into this school I was teaching at and thinking, that’s not my job—these students can practice or not. It was very freeing to realize that I can’t do this for them. It relieved a lot of stress, too, around being a teacher and having imposter syndrome and if I had to have them jump through hoops with recitals. I gave up on all that because that’s not what this is. Everyone gets treated differently, then. I want to find their interests, and if they don’t know, I can steer them in different ways.
I always try to raise body awareness. I want them to harness the forces of nature, to be aware of their physiology and gravity and inertia. And I try to do that for myself, too. When you play difficult music, you want to be in a state of dynamic relaxation where you can be in motion while also relaxed and releasing. I encourage my students to think about what they’re doing. But if people aren’t feeling it, I don’t want to steamroll them with theory. Plenty of music that I love, probably most of it, come from people just going for it. Like, does it sound cool? (laughter). We can codify that, and I do find that interesting, but I have no real books where I say, “You must go in this order.” I build from the ground up and pull tidbits from the sky.
The way you’re talking about the guitar reminds me of how you got into Bruce Lee many years ago. It’s hard to not think of martial arts in this way, and also in relation to dance—there’s a deep awareness of the body and the self.
When I was reading Bruce Lee’s journals, it was a cross-discipline thing where everything he was talking about was directly applicable to what I was doing as a musician—I just had to replace “combat” with “music” or “improvisation.” It’s been some years since I read that—probably eight years—but I’m realizing as I say this that so many things he wrote have permeated into things I regularly say. For example, in lessons I’ll talk about baseball or martial arts or dance. Like, what is martial arts? It’s kicking and punching. Now, what am I doing? I’m plucking the string or strumming or fretting. There are these basic motions, and that’s all this is at the end of the day.
When I’m teaching a lesson, especially a group class, I’ll say, “Now we’re going to pluck a string.” These things aren’t very sexy compared to the sort of videos you find on YouTube. There are so many resources online, and it’s interesting that people still come to weekly lessons, but I think it’s because you’re not gonna have these conversations. “What does it mean to pluck a string? We touch the string, we put some pressure on it, and then we release through the string. And now what’s the angle of your pick?” It’s all these details. And while this stuff is out there, it’s not what’s getting popular because of the algorithm. At the same time, there’s this “going for it” thing that has to happen. Another thing that Bruce Lee said is that “classical forms are organized anguish.” I’m over here learning Villa-Lobos etudes and that shit is beautiful, but fuck—it is organized anguish.
Around the time I was reading Bruce Lee, it was like, “Why wouldn’t you want a modicum of ability to defend yourself?” I realized that I didn’t have that at all, so I joined a kung fu school and went like five days a week. I saw a picture recently and I was like, damn, I was in shape—and it’s because I was getting my ass kicked five days a week (laughter). But at the core of it, it’s just a set of reflexes. I didn’t keep going at it because COVID hit, and I also thought I’d end up destroying my hands, but I do love the idea that this is organized anguish. I just related that to certain etudes or learning bebop heads. At the same time, there’s this “know thyself” thing that he was all about with Jeet Kune Do—the way of the intercepting fist. That was all super inspiring; it became a central thing inspiring my music.
You talked about body awareness, and I realized that I didn’t have any body awareness until way into my late 20s or 30s—I always found it hard to quantify space. I was always bored by shred practice; I was more interested in the color of sound than the technique it took to play clean and fast. I took some lessons with this guitarist named Freddie Bryant over a three-year period, and it was about a half-dozen lessons. This was someone who came and watched me play Villa-Lobos’ Etude No. 1 and said, “Oh, your finger isn’t hitting in the same place every time.” That’s not something that ever occurred to me. He observed me and was able to talk about what my hand was doing, about the tension in a particular spot, that I wasn’t hitting at the same place.
There was conceptual stuff in these lessons too, but the technical and physical stuff was a lot about observing. It completely changed my technique. Of course, it took me like three-plus years to do the remedial work to feel secure, but in doing that, he gave me the tools. And now I do that with my students—I’ll get down low and look at their hands, get different angles, and I’ll say, “Let’s slow that down tremendously. What are you doing in the silences in between the motions? You can be totally relaxed and play really slow, but move really fast between playing.” In music it’s “play slow, move fast”—you’ll play a note, but you have to get to the next note. You want to move in a nanosecond and be relaxed before you play the next note—and I really wanted to dive into that space. My lessons with him were where I realized how to quantify space. So that was really beneficial.
I’m thinking now of all your different practices—you’ve played standards, you have your proggy work in Ahleuchatistas, and then you have the new Autechre album. With Autechre, how are you aiming to capture the weird swing of the beats they have? You can feel how your body is affected by the specific cadences or rhythms they’re going for—were you trying to capture that?
Pretty early on I ruled out this percussive thing. I certainly thought about it, but that’s never really been my thing. I can see how I could make sense of it, where I get into tapping, but it’s not who I am as a musician. I’m more interested in counterpoint. It was like, how do I get that rhythmic thing? It ended up being that the kick patterns were the scaffolding, and if you zero in on a kick pattern in their songs, there’s really complex things happening, but you can locate it. For me, I have to engage with things visually at first. Transcribing is a learning tool. When I see it spatially organized, then I can deal with the different sides of the counterpoint. And this is the skeleton key that opened up the record for me.
I’d worked on “Slip” and “Bike” and I was like, damn, there’s so much there, how is this gonna work? Then I went to “Eutow, “ which is the first song I completed, and then I felt determined. I had a process, and as soon as I locked into that kick pattern, I could write it out and find the melodic material that, for me, was the emphasis of the piece. Sometimes I had to include guitaristic language, and “Eutow” is a good example of that—the kick and the single notes weren’t enough, so I would throw in a drone string to make it full and engaging. With something like “Corc” it’s like, what is going on? That was the hardest one to transcribe.
So this was a very regimented process. I’ve done records like Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016) where Zorn was like, take as long as you need. And that took about 9 months. But this was Bill telling me that he wanted to announce the record on December 5th, and we’d been talking about it for a while—about a year—before we locked into this. At the beginning of August I had a three-month window. The trajectory of it was like, I need a month and a half to transcribe, I need a month to demo, and I need two weeks to record. And that’s what happened. It was brutal in terms of time. My friend Cyrus Pireh said I wasn’t burning the candle at both ends, I was just throwing it into the fire (laughter).
“Corc” in particular took two weeks or so. It’s super spatial at first and it has these bass notes that act as this spatial scaffolding, then you have a melody and a countermelody, and then there’s a coda. It felt like I had a pick axe and was going through a tunnel with that song. I was in the car transcribing this, waiting for my daughter who’d be in a class for an hour. There is this joyfulness, though, in the revelation of decoding. There are these different instruments articulating these lines, and I had to do things like octave displacement to make things playable, I had to subtract things so it could fit on the guitar. That song is the high watermark of transcription arrangements on the record—it felt like I had climbed a mountain.
I’d say the hard part is over. Now I’m at this stage where I have gigs coming up and practicing is really enjoyable. Andrés Segovia would talk about how he’d polish one phrase for months until it glistened in the sunshine. I’m trying to give these songs that same TLC—can I pull more resonance, can I pull more glow out of this music? So they’re evolving in these subtle ways.
What sort of things do you feel like you learned from transcribing and playing this music as opposed to all the proggy and bluesy music you’ve done in the past?
It’s about the rhythmic aspect of where Autechre locates melodic material. A lot of the time, it’s syncopated off the 16th note. It’s a subtle division of the quantizing, but they do it so much that there’s this really kaleidoscopic aspect to something like “Corc” or even “Eggshell,” like (hums downscale melody). At first you’re like, oh it’s this simple melody, it’s this scalar thing going down in thirds, but then you realize it’s syncopated in this weird way against the beat. I was talking with Courtney—my wife and champion over this project—and I’d ask her about these arrangements. She knows this stuff better than I do and she said, “That melody is always so hard to sing. You think you can sing it but when you try, there’s something off about it.” So from looking at these songs closely, I started to intuit those types of syncopations more naturally. And when I look at other things, like Grant Green guitar solos, I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t on the ‘and’.”
With prog music, you have these longform phrases where it’s hard to detect the repetition. I just had this flashback of being 20 and playing with a bunch of musicians and asking, “Where’s the 1?” That’s a common thing with Autechre’s music, certainly their later music. There are repetitive themes you can pick out in the earlier stuff but it’s still like, “Where’s the 1?” There was always this ah-ha moment when I realized where the repeat was in a sequence. It was like, “Oh, okay, it doesn’t go on forever, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I can move onto the next part.” That’s really interesting for me because it’s how I want to play the guitar. I’m not a soloist, I don’t want to shred scales, and I don’t tend to improvise like that either—I tend to improvise around thematic material. You have these themes, and then there’s a playfulness within them. I feel like I’m getting closer to doing that naturally as an improviser.
What do you feel like you wouldn’t be able to do with the guitar if you hadn’t made this album?
A lot of guitar music is beholden to the quarter-note pulse, which is great, but it was also like… how do I get out of this? I’ve definitely thought about this in the past, like oh I could do a tumbao rhythm in the bass. I put a quarter-note pattern in “Slip”—I morphed that song into an American primitive-type vibe for various reasons—and that’s because it was too unwieldy. I tried other approaches, but that was it. The two questions I always ask are: Does it sound good? Do I enjoy playing it?
One of the biggest things is the amount of patience that I’ve learned in developing this music. Autechre’s music connects with people on a deeply emotional level, and that’s what I’m trying to evoke. These songs breathe so much. The way that “Eggshell” ends… the endings, man. They’re these codas that are very sparse and slow. “Bike” does that too. You’re allowing it to simmer down, and to play this music and for people to connect with it, I’m learning that I can really slow down, that I don’t have to play an insane amount of notes. I kind of knew that already from playing folk music, but it was even more so with this. The original tracks are nine minutes long, but mine are reduced, mostly hovering around the six-minute mark. That’s long for me in solo guitar land, especially through-composed. And I cut some stuff out that felt monotonous on solo guitar. The long intro on “Maetl” was just boring; I love the original track, but they have this whole sonic universe at their command while I only have a guitar (laughter).
You mentioned that you need two things: for music to sound good, and to enjoy playing it. Was that always the case?
I’ll ask my students about the best fingering for a song and they’ll say, “The easiest!” And I’ll say, “No!” And then some people will say, “…the hardest?” And I’ll be like, “Fuck no!” (laughter). So what’s the answer? It’s the one that sounds the best. And what does that look like? You have to figure that out, you have to try different ways of playing it until it sounds the best. It’ll maybe be the easiest way, and we hope it’s not the hardest way, but this is something you have to explore. When I’m working thematically, I want to be whimsical and play it in every register, with different fingerings and open strings and with specific chords that get reharmonized. There’s only so many hours in the day, though, so you need to get a handful of things at your disposal, otherwise you’re stuck with one thing. And then you can start mixing things up. That’s when things get interesting and complex—there’s this flowering quality where it’s blooming in different directions.
Can I be expressive while I’m playing? That’s the fundamental question. And am I living it? There are things that straddle that boundary. For example, “Avril 14th.” That’s a beautiful song to play and listen to. The ending is really hard. I had a bar gig in Athens the other night and I completely butchered the ending. And it sucks because it’s such a beloved song, so I feel a big weight of responsibility, least of all because that’s when people bust their phones out (laughter). I need to have the ending of that in my routine. There’s a psychological thing that happens when you get towards the end of the song—you have to psych yourself out of that. I saw someone say that you can change your mindset and say, “I get to play this really cool part” instead of, “Oh shit, here comes this really hard part.” And that actually does work wonders. To be honest, I just haven’t practiced it enough because I’m trying to play this Autechre music live. I haven’t played the song in 2 or 3 months, and to just bust it out… it’s just not ready-to-hand.
Any classical guitarist will talk about this too. In Julian Bream’s memoir, he breaks down his practice routine and it’s like, “an hour and ten minutes of watching the hands move, then an hour and a half of just the hard parts of the repertoire, and then I go for a walk and I come back and work on some things and then I play my gig.” He would book his tours around that routine so he could do that every day. People think this guy just shows up and plays the Bach Lute Suites every night, but no—it doesn’t work like that. It’s constant maintenance. It’s like Bruce Lee.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I love that I know that I don’t know, y’know? (laughter). I am so excited by learning and I constantly feel my own ignorance, but not in a bad way—it’s like wow, this is so interesting.
Oh, I wanted to ask—is there a reason your name is Shane Parish now and not Shane Perlowin?
My biological father’s name was Randy Heath and he was a boxer. He was in an accident in the ring when I was 4, and he became paralyzed and brain damaged for 16 years after that. My mom and him split when I was an infant, and she remarried this guy whose last name was Perlowin, and he made me take his last name legally—it’s an adopted name. He was very abusive to me for the ten years I lived with him. Around the time my daughter was born, in 2014, I had not been in touch with that side of the family for years. But I got this insane message from his step-son—though I think it was him pretending to be his step-son—and I had to explain that I had turned this page in my life, that there was no future for us. There was a lot of gaslighting involved with him saying that none of the things I said actually happened. At this point, I’d had a bit of a career using the Perlowin last name, and the last thing he said was, “If you don’t want to be a part of this family anymore, why don’t you throw away everything you’ve built with this name and change it?” And I did. That day, I took my grandmother’s last name, which is my mom’s maiden name, and I made a public announcement. My grandma was a source of light for me as a kid.
Do you mind sharing about her?
Her name was Martha. She’d take me out of school—I’d have my “Tuesday headache”—and let me come over to her house. We’d watch TV, she’d make soup, and she’d just sit with me, see me, and listen to me. She died when I was 14, but she was the person in my family who’d say things like, “You leave him alone! He’s a good boy!” It was clear to her that I was in an abusive environment. I have this one memory that I always remember, and it’s the place I always go to when I’m dealing with my inner-child shit. We were at her house and had these lawn chairs out on the driveway, and we watched a meteor shower together. There was this total peace, this warmth, this presence as I was talking with her. She was a shelter and a harbor, and it was so simple—it was just someone being with me. Our conversations were simple too. “Oh, look at that star!” It was life-saving.
Shane Parish’s new album, Autechre Guitar, is out now.
Shane’s Picks
I asked Shane to send me a list to accompany this interview. He sent a list of “South American guitarists, composers, and singers whom I dearly love and who have influenced me.”
Luiz Bonfá
Atahualpa Yupanqui
Violeta Parra
Jaime Guardia
Agustín Barrios Mangoré
João Gilberto
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Baden Powell
Bola Sete
Thank you for reading the 214th issue of Tone Glow. Life-savers.
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