Thursday, June 26th 2023  
Purr + Berra  
9pm - $15 - All Ages

PURR  
New York, NY  
https://purrpurrpurr.bandcamp.com/

Between 1966 and 1970, the American artist Barnett Newman painted a series of four large scale We paintings titledWho’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. They’re simple, but produce a whole register of feelings, emotions — the color is the subject, the paintings do not represent anything, but only express themselves. How can a canvas saturated in red synthesize something as complicated as fear? It just does. That painting series’ title was a reference toWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play from the 60s by Edward Albee, which was in itself a reference to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", the song from the 30s immortalized in Disney cartoons.

These Newman paintings are the conceptual backdrop of ‘Who Is Afraid ofBlue?,’ the sophomore album of lifelong New Yorkers Eliza Barry Callahan and Jack Staffen’s project Purr. It is in many ways a record about these abstract registers of fear — saturated with emotion, introspection, and that very sense of overwhelm.

‘Who is Afraid of Blue?’ also exists lightly in conversation with a short novel Callahan wrote  
(forthcoming via Catapult, 2024), an auto-fiction document of a woman losing her hearing. And all of it comes back to those Newman works: Purr makes music that functions like those large - scale paintings so very saturated with color. ‘Blue’ is a vast record, with lyrics that bend towards abstraction. But make no mistake: in that abstraction there is intense clarity. Blue is blue: a color, a feeling, a signifier, a way of looking at the world.

BERRA  
Washington, DC  
https://berra.bandcamp.com/

ACCESSIBILITY INFO: Comet is wheelchair accessible

All Ages

Rediscover Fire Booking

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Rediscover Fire

Purr, Berra

Purr, Berra

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Comet Ping Pong

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