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"Bright Red Paper could end up dominating Portland in a huge way. It's easy to get sucked in by their cello-driven, lengthy tunes with intricate, repetition-in-a-good-way grooves." -- Jim Withington. The Portland Mercury.

"Bright Red Paper is an anomaly... This is a band unburdened by the baggage of a rock band and fueled by talent and diversity in style." -- Michael Byrne. Willamette Week.

In the year and a half since Portland, Oregon's, Bright Red Paper released their self-titled EP, the band has toured the country making waves wherever they have gone, playing a wide variety of venues, from festivals and hipster bars, to wine bars, university lecture halls, strip clubs, retirement homes, biker bars...

All of this variation has led the band to develop into a cohesive and intuitive musical unit. Picking up Anna Byers along the way (in November 2006) the band, which was mostly instrumental before her appearance, took the material they had planned for their LP (some of it already mixed and mastered), and put it back into the musical blender that has churned out their uniquely developed music.

For a group which produces music that flows so naturally, Bright Red Paper has an unequivocably complicated process of songwriting for a rock group. Imagine a guitarist obsessed with NW indie rock, a classically trained cellist, a technophile jazz-funk bassist, and a drummer who has toured with punk acts, trying to improvise with each other. In the process the group creates a musical melting pot. "It's a process of pure collaboration," says cellist Douglas Jenkins, who has always called this group, "the most democratic musical experience I've ever been a part of." From the very beginning the group would improvise on themes and structures -- often for months -- finding little bits of inspired music in their improvisations and saving them up for a day when the ideas naturally gel into larger forms that can be debated and carved into the songs they present to the public.

Now imagine Anna joining this process -- a classically trained vocalist whose voice is pure beauty, adding more melodic play than semantic interference. Add to the mixture Anna's stage presence reminiscent of Nico but with a timeless soul and you have Bright Red Paper: A unique collaboration of multi-genre musicians, not emulating each other, but merging with one another in the truest sense. Portland's Willamette Week newspaper calls BRP a rock band "unburdened by the baggage of a rock band and fueled by talent and diversity in style."

Bright Red Paper is currently in the studio recording their LP for a summer release. A live album is due out in May 2007.

Performance History

Bright Red Paper played their first live show May 5, 2005, and since then have come to play in a wildly diverse assortment of halls in the Pacific Northwest and across the US to critical acclaim. Some spots the band has played:

• The Doug Fir Lounge. Portland, Oregon
• The Crocodile Cafe. Seattle, Washington
• The Make-Out Room. San Francisco, California
• The Knitting Factory. Hollywood, California
• The Hi-Dive. Denver, Colorado
• The South Union Arts Center. Chicago, Illinois
• The New Music West Festival, 2007, Vancouver B.C.
• PDX Pop Now! Festival, 2007, Portland
• The Top Down Film Festival, 2007, Portland
• The Main Stage of the Sweet Pea Festival. Bozeman, MT
• The Oregon Country Fair, 2007
• The campuses of The University of Oregon, Lewis and Clark College, Oregon State University, and UC Davis.

And venues of honorable mention where the band has played: retirement homes in two states; a strip club; a smattering of martini bars, the rooftop of the Hotel De Luxe in downtown Portland, biker bars, hippy bars and hipster bars; farmer's markets; a blues bar in Montana where we were coerced into covering "Stand By Me"; and an all-ages techno-dance club (which was packed, by the way).