By Andrea Barbe
With so many new artists emerging onto the music scene, one local group strives to stand apart from the rest. Seniors Bryan Truttmann and Ian Donahue formed Paper Rain, an experimental band that blends both their love of art with their passion for music. Truttman, an art major who will soon graduate from UNO’s fine arts program, came up with the idea of fusing both hobbies together after being involved in the arts for numerous years.
“I began to realize that a great deal of the inspiration I drew was from the world of music. It was a crucial part of my life and I felt that I had a lot of things to say through music but little means to do so,” Truttmann said. “I was greatly inspired by my friend Ky Ryan, who had created an entire record alone in his downtown apartment. I started to realize that music wasn’t just for the years I spent in a school band playing other composer’s songs or something reserved for the elite and seasoned musician, it was an important means of expression for everyone.”
From there, Truttmann contacted Donahue, a longtime friend of his, in hopes of learning how to play the guitar and gaining some new incite in the music industry. Following many conversations, they both learned that they each had the same goal: to work on an album about where their lives were going.
After months of band rehearsals, the pair decided they needed a name to call themselves.
“We started combining words from the textures and objects that I was using to create our world of sound,” Truttman said. “Paper Rain represents the ambient fields of sound that we were creating by hand, like a rain storm made [up] of the taps of paper, sticks and wood. At the same time, it suggests that the paper itself becomes the rain as if it were a storm of torn paper and confetti.”
The creative juices really started flowing when an art class opened up new pathways for the band mates.
“As I was studying video art under Professor Russ Nordman, I developed several videos and generated original soundtracks to them,” Truttmann said. “Later on, I began making videos for our songs.”
In late September, Paper Rain released its first album, Underwater Trees, a 10-track compellation of “weather patterns, time travel and nocturnal history.”
Fans of the band will be excited to get to hear their new material.
Paper Rain’s Underwater Trees is available for $11.50 and can be purchased at the Antiquarium, located at 12th and Harney streets in the Old Market.
