No peninsula is an island
Leaving downtown? Portlanders’ music is everywhere you look
By IAN PAIGE

Across the border in our twin city of Portsmouth (we look nothing alike, but we both like the color “brick”) is the great gift of THE RED DOOR. Manager Cresta Smith somehow makes a martini bar the coolest thing in the world, in part by providing a cozy ambience and consistently good music, thanks to booking agent Jay Boucher. The “Hush Hush Sweet Harlot” music series makes a Monday night road trip worth your time by providing living room performances from the likes of Tiger Saw, Soltero, and our own Seekonk and Phantom Buffalo.

A short walk up a flight of sharp and narrow stairs from busy State Street below, The Red Door is Portsmouth’s answer to suave and sophisticated hotspots more often found in cities like Boston or New York.

The vibe is mellow cool - accented by wood floors, comfortable couches and brick walls - and is in no way snooty.

Opened on Oct. 29, 2003 by Jay McSharry (aka the Donald Trump of Seacoast eateries - as in Jumpin’ Jay’s, Radici, Little Louie’s, Dover Soul, Dos Amigos Burritos and The Dunaway), The Red Door is run by Cresta Smith, one of the few bar managers who is both down to earth and strikingly beautiful.

read the whole article...

Get That Out of Your Mouth #14
Small Town Rock City
by Chris Dahlen

Everyone in Portsmouth, New Hampshire remembers when the Elvis Room closed. The rockers lost a stage where you could catch anyone from the local punk bands to Elliott Smith; the under-18'ers lost a room where they could smoke. The storefront on Congress Street was replaced by a kitschy blues lounge with life-size replicas of the Blues Brothers dancing in the front window; when that closed, a semi-chi-chi Italian restaurant opened in its place. The Elvis Room died six years ago, and Portsmouth hasn't had a rock club since.

Most nights of the week, the Red Door in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, caters to a chic after-work crowd with a menu of gourmet martinis — try the ginger pear, it’s fab — and DJs that spin trance and house beats. But on Mondays, a different scene takes over: Dressed in denim and hoodies, they occupy every leather stool, loveseat, and pillow-strewn couch in the room to listen intently to acoustic music. The room’s dark-red walls and wooden beams start to look more like a country inn than an urban lounge, and the crowd’s so still that you can almost hear the musicians think.

read the whole article...

John Vanderslice comes to Portsmouth’s Red Door Saturday. Film buffs, history majors and bowlers welcome.

The reputation of some rock musicians are often made on their after-show antics. Motley Crue, for example, would have been just four dyslexic guys with large hair in leopard skin thongs, if it weren’t for the tales of copious amounts of sex with groupies and drug abuse. However, there are few artists in the music biz who would invite an entire concert worth of people to go bowling after a show. John Vanderslice just did. “We asked the whole audience at a show in L.A. if they wanted to go bowling and 30 or 40 showed up,” he says (the winners of each frame got free tickets to another show). Of course the singer-songwriter doesn’t need a resume of debauchery to raise eyebrows.

read the whole article...

When Chris DeVries first got behind the controls at WUNH in the early 1990s, he’d use his late-night show to experiment with music from artists he didn’t recognize—Juno Reactor, Orbital, Global Communication, the Orb, and more. As electronic music grew during that era and artists like Underworld, Chemical Brothers and Prodigy became more mainstream, he convinced the station that it was time for a dedicated programming slot. At 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 1996, Trance Lab hit the air. This week, DeVries celebrates the 10th anniversary of the show—which now includes club dates and weekly podcasts—with a party at the Red Door in Portsmouth on Saturday, Jan. 7.

read the whole article

On the outside, State Street’s newest business consists of a simple red door. On the other side of that door, however, lies a fusion of modern urban and vintage New England themes that offers something unique to the Port City night.

read the whole article...

As the aesthetes invade dance music, trance has taken more blows than Douglas gave Tyson. In all of electronic music, trance is the genre most associated with goofy rave anthems, Mickey Mouse gloves, and glowsticks. Its garish synth stabs (think 2 Unlimited’s "Ya’ll Ready For This!?!") and skull-bashing repetition have become embedded stereotypes of dance music. As with most typecasting those generalizations are unfair, but trance stands alone as the only electronic music genre that has never had a subtle message. Along with the rest of the electronic landscape, this is changing. More trance DJs, like Tiesto and Paul Oakenfold, are tipping their caps to melodies and craft-oriented music. This has led to a kind of Minimal Trance: electronic music that’s still psychedelic, but toned way down. Instead of using 32 tracks of sound in the mix, the new producers make it simpler and colder.

read the whole article...