Bright Red Paper News

Greetings long lost email list of the Portland band Bright Red Paper,

We haven’t performed in over a year, and you may have forgotten us… we may have forgotten ourselves… but we’ve been courted to reunite and perform in Eugene in the coming month!

To remind us all, we’ve put a free song for download up on our site. This is D is for Dead Sea, re-mixed in collaboration with a symphony of cellos from The Portland Cello Project, and with Jessyka Luzzi singing… the recording is mixed by our old friend Larry Crane who did our EP.

D is for Dead Sea with Jessyka Luzzi

This has been music that has been missing from my life, so I’m very much looking forward to performing it again.

We will be sneak-previewing the reunion show TOMORROW NIGHT (or TONIGHT, if you don’t check your email every 5 minutes like I do) — which is to say Saturday, 8/16 at 9pm. Dan Enberg and Douglas Jenkins will be playing a song or two with The Portland Cello Project at Cozmic Pizza in Eugene, Oregon, in the Cello Project’s Eugene debut.

And the full, original line-up of Bright Red Paper will be performing on 9/13 at The WOW Hall as part of the Eugene Celebration. Also on that bill will be Portland darlings Weinland.

So why aren’t we playing in Portland? Not sure… would you want to see us up here? Perhaps we will book a show in the same timeframe… stay tuned.

Douglas Jenkins

We’re taking a little break from performing in Portland so we can focus on finishing this LP. (And we are indeed almost done…) We’ve tracked 9 songs now at various places in Portland. We’ll have 14 total, and probably choose 9 for the LP.

It’s been an interesting recording process. The last formal studio-esque time we have planned will be 9/11 at The Old Church in downtown Portland, where our friend Adam Selzer (M. Ward, Norfolk and Western) of Type Foundry Studios will be recording us playing The Viscount (the sparse instrumental featuring counterpoint between the cello and bass you may have seen live). We’re going to record that piece completely live — all playing at the same time with no separation — in the middle of the sanctuary. We’ll also try to do a song in that session with a quartet from The Portland Cello Project. The space should yield an interesting sound…

Thanks again for all of your support! We’ll be performing officially again in Portland in October! But we might play some small secret shows between now and then… sign up on our mailing list for info about those.

We will still play some jaunts outside of town, though… we’ll see you at the Eugene Celebration 9/7!

Hi!

Dan and I will be playing instrumental cello/guitar improvisations on Bright Red Paper themes at Mississippi Pizza 8/28 at 9pm. We’re supporting our friend Valerie Orth from San Fran who will be up here on tour.

We hope to see you there!

Doug

Hi All,

We’re playing the PDX-Pop Now! Festival, which is a wonderful, pure, all-ages, free music festival showcasing more than 50 bands here in Portland the entire weekend of 8/3-8/5. We are playing at 2pm. The festival this year is at Audio Cinema which is a music/arts collective in the SE industrial area — 226 SE Madison Street (under the Hawthorne Bridge). We hope to see you there!

This will be our last show in Portland for a while as we focus all of our energy on finally finishing tracking our LP!

Thanks again for all of your support!

For the first time ever, Bright Red Paper will be the opening band for a movie at a film festival on the top of a parking garage in downtown Portland! And it’s a great movie at that!

Details cut and pasted from the NW Film Center’s Website. Admission pays for our performance and the movie. So come and hang out!

THE KILLING
US 1956
Director: STANLEY KUBRICK
Thu Aug 02 8:00 PM Hotel DeLuxe - 729 SW 15th Ave

After spending five years in Alcatraz, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) decides that if he’s going to commit crimes, the risk had better be worth the punishment-so he masterminds a brilliant scheme to steal $2 million from a local racetrack. The beauty of the plan is that it’s foolproof and “no one will get hurt…” Hitchcockian suspense and a fresh take on noir enrich this classic heist film from a young Kubrick, subject of a NWFC retrospective indoors) through August. (85 min)

Music: Bright Red Paper

BUY TICKETS

We arrived safely after driving all night from our show at the Make-Out Room last night in San Fran. We’re grateful for the great reception we got and all of the really nice people we met. Kyle sent me this link to videos and photos he took of the show — thanks!

Bright Red Paper at the Make-Out Room

Wow — we can’t get over what we experienced in Davis this week-end. We stayed at the Agrarian Effort Co-Op on the UC Davis campus, where we played an outdoor house party for the campus co-ops and whoever else wanted to show up. The show took place on an x-mas tree lit stage under shooting stars, in front of the solar paneling that powers the houses on this oasis-acre of farmland in the middle of the UC campus.

The place was fascinating. A model of how life should be lived, in so many ways. Positively community-oriented, environmentally-minded… they really have something to be proud of. We met so many wonderful people. Earlier in the day we played at the Davis Farmer’s Market, which is one of the oldest farmer’s markets in California. We Oregonians envy Californian produce…

Everyone at these shows who wanted CDs are getting a bonus. As our EP is sold out we have been making CD-Rs with the entire EP and a few bonus tracks on them.

It’s felt great to be on the road. This is the best thing about playing music: meeting so many wonderful people.

A quick note to say that we sold out that huge run of our EP (which we thought would last forever) at a festival in Eugene last weekend. You can still get digital copies on iTunes and cdbaby.com still has a few in stock.

Wow — this was perhaps the most amazing experience of this band’s existence thus far. And that’s saying a lot. We’ve played retirement homes, strip clubs, biker bars, cowboy bars, huge arts festivals, fancy martini bars and parties, the hippest clubs on the west coast… but our two shows at the Country Faire this weekend in Eugene… I don’t even know where to begin to describe the experience.

For those of you who don’t know about this fair, it takes place in a forest where food booths, clothing boutiques, fortune tellers, secret spots, libraries, places for drum circles, etc, are all carved (carefully and safely) out of the trees in a huge forest area. There are 15 or so stages constantly with music, not to mention parades, dragons, wasps, clowns, etc., wandering the grounds constantly.

And such a wonderful assortment of people from all walks of life. This fair has a reputation as a hippie fair, which it is in many ways, but the diversity of backgrounds of the people there is a beautiful sight. Maybe we are all hippies at heart. (Whatever “hippie” actually means, I don’t know. This classical cellist born and raised in Hawai’i had the time of his life.)

How often after a show do I open our merchandise suitcase and find that someone was stirred enough during our performance to write a poem for us and hide it in our merch case when we are not looking? Here it is:

This is a translucent

seduction
of paper and men
you call
wait
anticipate
they will respond
tangible harmonies
got grief dripping down my knees
and the walls fall silent

your pentatonic pain
feels like the rain
falling on my face

-Alina Wigle

Sweet. Super sweet.

We’ve had people dance tangos at our shows (also in Eugene), but hula hooping — this was a first. It was awesome to have also a big troupe of people doing that kind of slinky-body hippie dance. right in front of the stage.

We gave away some free shirts to the best three dancers at our second show — one of whom was dancing at both our shows. I think we should have given shirts to all the dancers. If you were a dancer and want a shirt, drop a line to brightredpaper@gmail.com and we’ll get you one.

We were lucky enough to camp overnight at the festival. (This is a festival that closes at 7pm but the 15,000 people who work there stay and camp overnight.) And that was when the party really began. There were shows on the main stage all night, pretty much (Albino played, who were completely awesome). And the food vendors stay open late.

Anyway, it was quite the experience and we hope to have the opportunity to return.

Greetings Willamette Valley Residents!

Here’s wishing you not-so-debilitating allergies this fine season!

Portland’s Bright Red Paper will be playing this weekend in Corvallis and Eugene.

Friday night, June 8, we will be at The Bomb’s Away Cafe in Corvallis at 9pm — 21+, $5. We will play two big sets full of new material (we go into the studio to record the last few songs for our LP, and so we’ll be testing out a lot of new material on you… as well as all of our classics, of course).

Then Sunday night, June 10 we will be in Eugene at Sam Bonds Garage with 3-Leg Torso playing an early, 8pm set.

We hope to see you there!

Doug