Black Tape For A Blue Girl – Chamber Gothic

Black Tape For A Blue Girl is the vehicle through which Sam Rosenthal has practically reinvented goth music. An open-ended project in which the keyboardist and songwriter (and proud “non-musician”, according to the expression coined by Brian Eno) has surrounded himself with talents largely drawn from the prized stable of Projekt Records, the label he himself founded back in 1983, which has since become the hub of today's American “gothic” scene.
“Tracce di una purezza più profonda”, the title of their masterpiece, fully captures the sense of their celestial music, in which every possible earthly implication of our wandering takes on “original” connotations, and, precisely, a more essential purity. In Sam Rosenthal's compositions, in fact, music becomes the authentic voice of existence's dark, chaotic depths, revealing the intensity of the fire stirring beneath the seemingly placid surface of reality.
The song-form, then, is dissolved by the apocalyptic whirl of a musical format born from the perfect fusion of dark sensibility and the austerity of chamber classical music. An electro-acoustic minimalism capable of producing chords like candid swarms of enchanted figures floating in the ether, slipping little by little into the mental illusion of dream, not unlike the visual art of Marcel Duchamp, which has greatly inspired Rosenthal's work, along with the books of Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre and Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch. Onto this canvas come the solemn voices of singers like Oscar Herrera, Lucian Casselman and Elysabeth Grant, all wonderfully at ease within these blinding scores of the unknown.
“Black Tape For A Blue Girl is the place where I turn my thoughts and visions into art,” explains Rosenthal. “Everyone who works with me adds their own talent, but knowing that I've decided where it needs to be added. It's like a play. I'm the director, and I have the final word.”

Hypnotized by the sirens

Raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Rosenthal founded Projekt in 1983, originally as an outlet for his own electronic compositions. After moving to California to finish his studies, he formed Black Tape For A Blue Girl three years later. Their core sound was already in place: an ethereal layer of electronic keyboards, an intricate web of delicate acoustic arrangements, and vocal parts entrusted to classically trained singers, first and foremost Oscar Herrera. As if the darker shades of Dead Can Dance, Miranda Sex Garden and This Mortal Coil had been transformed into Prokofiev symphonies.

The formula was first fine-tuned on The Rope (1986), an album split into two parts: one sung, one instrumental. Almost nothing remains of the traditional gothic framework, though its shadow still lingers faintly, hidden behind the grey autumnal landscapes or in the melancholy expression of the woman's face pictured on the cover. Though still immature and recorded in an amateurish fashion, the record already reveals their dreamy, sinister raptures, cradled by Rosenthal's enveloping synths. The voices of Oscar Herrera and Kim Prior, intertwining with the violins of Candy Sherlock and Lara Radford, give rise to solemn chants ("Memory, Uncaring Friend", "End"), which occasionally glance eastward ("The Holy Terrors") or indulge in thriller-like atmospheres ("Hide In Yourself"). There's a rougher sound here and a more pronounced percussive drive compared to the ambient expansiveness of later works, thanks in part to multi-instrumentalist Allan Kraut (drums, guitar and bass).
The second half of the record, on the other hand, highlights the instrumental side of the project: "Seven Days Till Sunrise" is finely embroidered by Greg Wilson's guitar arpeggios and embellished with clarinet and cello, the classically-tinged lied for strings of "The Floor Was Hard But Home" is a showcase of their rarefied elegance, the title track drapes one of their most "rock" pieces in Indian exoticism, "The Few Remaining Threads" even conjures western overtones, and "The Lingering Flicker" sinks into languid dream-pop reveries. Closing things out is "We Return", where everything dissolves into a faint folk iridescence, with voices blending into soft carpets of synthesizers and violins.

In the same period, the American musician also devoted himself to Before The Buildings Fell, a solo project drawing on the ambient minimalism of Steve Roach.

A year later, with Mesmerized By The Sirens, Rosenthal accentuated the atmospheric, mystical side of his music. Back come the evocative ambient landscapes and the Eden-garden female voices (the overture of "Jamais Pars" and the finale of "Seireenien Lumoama" — the latter featuring a guitar arpeggio that would teach Portishead a thing or two for "The Rip"), while the dark-wave foundation grows even more evanescent, giving way to an ethereal-ambient sound close to certain Dead Can Dance productions and to the 4AD school in general (Sue-Kenny Smith's mesmerizing vocalizing, for instance, can't hide its debt to the ethereal muse Elizabeth Fraser).
Rosenthal chisels out livid chamber ballads ("Dark Skinned And Inviting", "With A Million Tears"), which combine the icy language of the avant-garde (Budd, Roach) with melodic openings of throbbing intensity. A desolate, romantic spleen also comes through in the lyrics, tales of broken hearts and inextinguishable pain: chief among them the gothic-hued love portrait of "A Teardrop Left Behind", declaimed by Herrera with matchless pathos over a backdrop woven from Walter Holland's acoustic guitar and Rosenthal's sumptuous synthetic arrangements. Another chilling turn from Herrera comes on "Beneath The Planks", where Richard Watson's clarinet and Rosenthal's synthetic harpsichord lend a sense of classicism. "Scream, My Shallow", with spoken-word passages in Spanish, brushes up against Lovecraftian horror peaks.
The variety of singers (eight in all) and instruments doesn't undermine the solidity of a record that rejects the conventional schemes and structures of rock songwriting (the only concessions are perhaps the two new tracks on which Kraut once again collaborates) in favor of the airy, symphonic sound that would characterize their later output.

The evolution toward this peculiar "gothic-ambient" sound was completed on the following Ashes In The Brittle Air (1989), where the usual atmospheric textures are joined by other extraordinary vocal feats, with Herrera and Kenny-Smith once again taking center stage. But what also enriches the record is the large cast of musicians involved, bringing together a wide array of instruments ranging from guitars to strings, from percussion to clarinet.
The first half of the record contains a few striking ballads rooted in the most mesmeric litanies of the Cocteau Twins and the medieval moors of Dead Can Dance. The ethereal title track drifts across a misty synthetic pond, punctuated by the tribal pulse of percussion, with Kenny-Smith's fairy-like whisper growing ever more angelic; "Across A Thousand Blades" is a gothic piece of the highest order, with Herrera's anguished delivery set to obsessive pulsations, fretless bass and guitars in the vein of Siouxsie And The Banshees; "The Touch And The Darkness" plunges into chasms of cosmic trance; while "The Scar Of A Poet" resounds as if straight from the netherworld, with its echoes, sinister noises and funereal music-box chimes.
The second half of the album, by contrast, turns more experimental, moving between rarefied electronic symphonies ("Am I So Deceived"), fairy-like sighs in the vein of Enya ("I Ran To You") and the singers' free vocalizing ("From The Tightrope").
The lyrics, heavily influenced by Nietzsche and existentialism, tell stories of titanic emotional despair.
A well-crafted album, which nonetheless leaves a sense of incompleteness. The impression remains that the band, now equipped with these tools, could still do more.

Meanwhile, Projekt was starting to become a beacon of the American gothic scene, helped also by the simultaneous debut of the monumental Lycia, led by Michael Van Portfleet, who would go on to craft another spectacular saga of their own. And Rosenthal was, more than ever, the deus ex machina of this dark renaissance under the California sun.

Torment and ecstasy

With A Chaos Of Desire (1991), Black Tape once again present a handful of formidable singers, including the trusty Oscar Herrera and Julianna Towns (Skinner Box). The other exceptional guest star is Pat Ogl of Thanatos, voice and guitar on the placid "How Can You Forget Love?". Drawing on the ambient watercolors of Brian Eno and the glacial chants of Nico, Rosenthal and co. manage to weave together atmospheres that are at once celestial and mournful, luminous and funereal.
The dreamlike overture of "These Fleeting Moments" is followed by lieder of austere solemnity: the title track, built entirely on menacing organ rumbles, the piano madrigal "Tear Love From My Mind", entrusted to Towns' sublime soprano, the more rhythmic "Pandora's Box", bolstered by a melody worthy of Roxy Music, or the deeply mournful suite "We Watch Our Sad-Eyed Angel Fall". But the peak of lyrical intensity comes in the nine minutes of "The Hypocrite Is Me", another contrite declamation from Herrera, drowned in a river of electronics and embellished in its finale by Vicki Richards' solo violin.
Rosenthal's secular spirituality shines instead in the cosmic suite of "Beneath The Icy Floe", where violins trace swirling patterns over nebulae of keyboards in the style of Schulze, and in the ecstatic rapture of "Of These Reminders".
A Chaos Of Desire is the ideal summa of Black Tape's early career, the record that fixes their sound in unmistakable form.

Meanwhile, Rosenthal also indulged in a side project, teaming up with another fine sound sculptor, the Belgian Vidna Obmana: Terrace Of Memories (Projekt, 1992) contains five drones, light and fluttering like flower petals swept by the wind, with Susan Jennings' voice embodying melancholy reincarnated as a young girl.

The next Black Tape chapter, This Lush Garden Within (1993), delves even further into neoclassical territory, skillfully playing with perspective and fade effects. It's also the record that most closely mirrors — if not the sound, then the methods — of a band often compared to Rosenthal's ensemble: This Mortal Coil. Just as the English supergroup drew on the entire 4AD roster, here Black Tape assembles almost the whole Projekt team, with Padraic Ogl of Thanatos, Mike Vanportfleet of Lycia and Ryan Lum of Love Spirals Downwards. And, like Fraser and co., Black Tape also choose to cover a song, in this case "Gravity's Angel" by Laurie Anderson (entrusted to the voice of Susan Jennings, a kind of "muse" for the album, also pictured on the cover).
The central theme is the relationship between earthly impermanence and a distant, omnipotent divinity. Pain becomes a necessary condition for reaching the deepest, truest love, and conversely, love seems inevitably to lead to suffering. The contrast is once again conveyed through the alternation of male and female voices. The siren song of the stunning new vocalist Lucian Casselman evokes the sensuality and beauty of carnal life, while Herrera's deep, passionate singing simulates the sufferings of humankind, as Rosenthal's exotic-gothic settings seem almost to trace a path toward infinity.
The ambient incipit of "Left Unsaid" immediately draws us into these ghostly lands through solemn choirs and austere piano chimes, the title track evokes occult rituals worthy of Christian Death, the mournful madrigals "The Broken Glass", "The Flow Of Our Spirit" and "Our Future Imagined" update baroque sonatas for the synthetic age, while "We Exist Entwined" indulges in leaden tones and Middle Eastern melismas.
The dream-pop legacy resurfaces instead amid the childlike whispers of "Gravity's Angel", punctuated only by faint bell chimes and distant echoes, and in the disjointed murmuring of "The Turbulence And The Torment", wrapped in dense electronic spirals.
These are episodes of undeniable elegance, though at times they sound a bit one-note. The album's true tours de force are rather the ecstatic dirge of "Overwhelmed Beneath Me" and the metaphysical reflection of "The Christ In The Desert", left to drift through cosmic black holes amid rumbles and indistinct noises.
Overall, an album of light and shade, where the crowding of stars only sometimes works, at other times undermining the record's overall identity.

A deeper purity

Three years later came The First Pain To Linger (1996), a box set including an 85-page booklet of brief lyrical prose fragments and a six-track EP (four already known, plus two previously unreleased ambient pieces). But it was another release that would brand the year indelibly and crown the entire Black Tape For A Blue Girl saga.

1996, in fact, is the year of Remnants Of A Deeper Purity, Sam Rosenthal's masterpiece, and one of the absolute pinnacles of gothic music.
The "deepest" point of this ritual of the absolute and the mysterious lies in the 26 minutes of "For You Will Burn Your Wings Upon The Sun", a dramatic five-part descent into the labyrinths of the human soul. In a desolate, arcane space, the menacing drones of the keyboards spread out, while Vicky Richards' violin begins its dazzling dance on the edge of the precipice. The voices of the two shamans of the absolute weave a hypnotic magma of emotion, before being swallowed up by cosmic void. Mera Roberts' cello also helps heighten the overwhelming sense of pathos that pervades almost everything here. The third part of this ecstatic delirium pushes the sonic mass toward the most unfathomed extremes of the universe, in an ancestral vortex made of inscrutable divine symbols, in whose contemplation "Wings Tattered, Fallen" takes shape, an ambient piece with subtly mystical overtones. We're not so far from Bach's symphonies.
The grandiloquent enchantment of "Redifine Pure Faith" closes with a tender piano sonata, a prelude to the tragedy-tinged sweetness of "Fin De Siécle", inspired by a story by Anais Nin. "With My Sorrows" is another great vocal performance from Herrera, while "Fitful" revisits cosmic flashes complete with "treated" vocals (Casselman).
The only track that approaches a traditional song form is the title track, albeit in a thoroughly peculiar way. The grieving piano notes of "Again, To Drift (For Veronika)", meanwhile, reinforce the record's strong ties to certain of new age music's most dreamlike settings. At this point, all that's left is the minimalism of "I Have No More Answers", in which Casselman reaches one of the highest peaks of her anguished delivery. The long coda of drones and muted echoes is an open space onto the clearing of the world, observed without prejudice and without fear, but with infinite sorrow, and without any redemption.
Rosenthal's "negative" philosophy has found its most intense artistic counterpart in these 77 minutes of indelible emotion. The fall into time — as Cioran called it — may have condemned man to the experience of his own fragility, but in turn it also granted him the chance to probe its mystery. This attempt, doomed to fail precisely because it is carried out from a human, and therefore "finite", perspective, finds its pivotal moment in the instant of creation, whose sole purpose is to let Truth become accessible to man. Of all this, Remnants Of A Deeper Purity is a shining, majestic, unforgettable example.

Black Tape's music explores the darkest recesses of the soul, in search of hope, of a way out of a human fate marked by suffering and death. "It's not that I see life in a negative way," Rosenthal says. "I'm not preaching some glorious fall or destruction of humankind, which many 'dark' acts hold dear. I'm full of hope for the future, I feel close to an 'existentialist' way of thinking, à la Sartre. There's no fate or destiny, we alone are the architects of ourselves. Because no god will ever come down to find us the perfect lover or to make us happy. We have to do it ourselves".
A secular, deeply human spirituality runs through Remnants Of A Deeper Purity. "It's a record about rebirth, about stripping away years of stains from the soul, and watching it rise again into a new life", Rosenthal explains. Musically, it's a demonstration of how a dark sensibility can marry the austerity of classical music: "I think I've moved further and further away from the traditional song structure. In these pieces there are often just two chords, with few harmonic passages or key changes. I've created a kind of bed, on which the voices and strings can then lie".

Having brought in singer-violist Elysabeth Grant, Rosenthal's ensemble continued on its path with the mini-CD With My Sorrows (a 20-minute summary, and little more, of their music) and, above all, with the album As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire (1998). The common thread running through the 13 tracks is the concept of desire as a catalyst for change in relationships and human behavior. It's a theme Rosenthal explores starting from Marcel Duchamp's work "The Bride Stripped Bare", probing the darkest recesses of eroticism and passion. The result is over 70 minutes of enveloping harmonies set in idyllic sonic landscapes. The music still moves between claustrophobic electro-acoustic ballads and forlorn madrigals, between gothic cathedrals and piano themes bordering on a certain Teutonic solemnity (Popol Vuh circa "Hosianna Mantra"). Back come the seraphic female voices, the romantic flourishes of violins and a flute as essential as it is poignant.
The title track unwinds over the notes of a hushed piano and oboe, unfolding into a madrigal for strings that culminates in a duet between female voices. Dancing violins (Vicki Richards) and strumming guitar send Julianna Towns' melody soaring in "Given", which fades into a flute coda — "Entr'acte (The Garden Awaits Us)" — paving the way for the melodrama of "Tell Me You've Taken Another" (with excerpts from Von Sacher-Masoch, circa 1870), where Herrera's baritone once again reigns supreme.
The medieval clarinet interlude of "Entr'acte/ The Carnival Barker" and the evanescence of vocal samples and dissonant violins in "Dream" pave the way instead for the waves of "The Apotheosis", an ambient pièce that brings to mind Eno in his "Apollo" era. The piano sonata "Russia" revisits the Prokofiev theme already used by Sting in "Russians", though in a far more alienating fashion. "Dulcinea" is a soft prayer in the vein of Enya, driven by a cyclical keyboard riff and adorned with flute phrases. The brass-and-strings instrumental "The Green Box" leads into the tour de force of "Denouement/ Denouncement": faint piano chimes and a distant drone accompany Towns' melancholy recitation, while harpsichord, harmonium and violin trade off, finally fading into the hallucinations of "The Passage", over 15 minutes of ambient electronics, barely rippled by a distant violin.
Overall, a finely crafted album, though it lacks the power and depth of its predecessor.

Kafka and the unhappy bride

Black Tape return in 2002 with The Scavenger Bride, an album entirely devoted to Franz Kafka and 1913 Prague, complete with an elegant booklet meant as an extension of the music and lyrics, forming a single, composite "work of art." The sound ranges between classical-leaning melodies and turn-of-the-century atmospheres, icy electronic breezes and Renaissance sonatas, tender lyricism and murky drama: theatrical shades dominate (Brecht above all), along with dreamlike moods lost in the fog of Old Europe.
For the occasion, Black Tape For A Blue Girl assemble a veritable orchestra, featuring – besides Rosenthal's "ambient" keyboards – a string section with violin, viola and cello, the magical flute of Lisa Feuer (also pictured on the album cover), dulcimer, mandolin, drums and percussion courtesy of Michael Laird of Unto Ashes, the voice and guitar of Bret Helm of Audra, as well as the vocals of Elysabeth Grant, Athan Maroulis of Spahn Ranch, Martin Bowes of Attrition and many more besides. The result is a sophisticated concept album dedicated to an unhappy bride, her torments, her past loves. The choice of title is curious: "Scavenger" derives from the Anglo-Norman "scawager," meaning "street-sweeper." 
It's a collection of (semi-)classical lieder, beautifully arranged and brimming with suspense. The electronic incipit of the title track leads into the poignant "Kinski," a tribute to Werner Herzog's favorite actor, improvised by Elysabeth Grant's voice over a lush backdrop of keyboards, flute and dulcimer; "All My Lovers" is a sort of medieval saltarello updated for the synth age; the anguished lullaby of "Shadow Of A Doubt" twists a Sonic Youth song into a sensual crescendo of piano, percussion and viola; the mournful psalmody of "The Scavenger Daughter" (Bowes plus Grant) floats over tolling piano and a symphonic drone.
Maroulis shows off a decadent, Bowie-esque register on the splendid waltz "A Livery Of Bachelors"; Helm's baritone sinks "The Lie Which Refuses To Die" into Bauhaus-like horror swamps; while master Steve Roach offers a "noise" cameo on "Like A Dog/Letter To Brod," a three-part gothic liturgy for viola, violin, piano, electronics, treated voices and gong, in which Bowes' spoken word crashes against a wall of keyboards. The pianistic farewell of "Bastille Day 1961," with Grant's voice finally allowed to rise in pitch, is the worthy, moving conclusion to a sumptuous work, further enriched by a few brief but evocative instrumental interludes. An extraordinary confirmation for a band that never stops surprising, while always remaining true to itself.

For the follow-up, Halo Star (2004), Rosenthal brings in Bret Helm (Audra) on vocals and guitar and Michael Laird (Unto Ashes) on percussion. Both of them, incidentally, had already appeared on The Scavenger Bride, and Rosenthal essentially does little more than expand on the parts they played on that record. In doing so, he scales back the density of the arrangements, which go from thick, lush and symphonic to simpler and more acoustic.
The album opens with the percussive, Eastern-tinged intro of "Glow" and the single "Tarnished," pleasant and energetic but ultimately rather weak. From there, though, the record gives way to subdued, hazy, melancholic songs like the gorgeous "The Gravediggers" and "Indefinable, Yet," which returns to the sensual, ethereal moods of the previous record (on vocals is none other than the protagonist of that multi-voiced recital that was The Scavenger Bride, the excellent Elysabeth Grant).
The mysterious "Knock Three Times" is marked by the tolling of a piano that seems to weep in the background, and beautifully chiseled by Helm's voice. The second single "Scarecrow" is a splendid ballad that forms the dramatic climax of the record. Two romantic and deeply sad arias, "Damn Swan!" and the magical "Already Forgotten" – both sung by Grant – further stretch out the atmospheres. "The Fourth Footstep" is a long, visionary fairy tale, the last gasp of air before "Dagger" and the title track close the record on increasingly dark and suffocating notes.
Where The Scavenger Bride was rich and majestic, Halo Star is instead pared down to the essentials, understated, almost languid. A record that demands patient listening, one that allows the listener to grasp the beating heart of life, beauty and emotion stirring beneath its only seemingly bare and frozen surface.

An ambient odyssey

Freed from the lyrical and gothic trappings of his main project, Rosenthal creates a new incarnation in absolute solitude, As Lonely As Dave Bowman, as the name borrowed from the protagonist of "2001: A Space Odyssey" aptly suggests, throwing himself without hesitation into one of the most profound and fascinating ambient works of recent times. There are no field recordings working in the background, no soporific minimalism in Rosenthal's ambient art: his music operates, as usual, at a level of visionary superiority. Pod seems to be the work he had been waiting a lifetime to make, since his early cassette releases, before Black Tape, such as Before The Buildings Fell (1986) and through the splendid Terrace Of Memories (1992). But only now, at 42, does Sam finally release his first proper solo work.
Across the five movements that make it up, Pod unfolds as a monumental journey synthesizing the "cosmic" ambient of the German pioneers with the more interior, psychological kind practiced by Roach, Budd, Eno... Monumental, because Rosenthal's electronics always retain their pictorial grandeur, even when moving through the cold, the void, the aseptic immensity of the universe, whether the outer, infinite one or the inner, more intimate and profound one.

While awaiting the new album, expected at the start of next year, Black Tape release an anthology compilation out in Russia (A Retrospective) and a new EP, available in digital format, made up of Sonic Youth covers!

At the same time, the tireless Rosenthal founded another band, Revue Noir, together with singer Nicki Jaine, built around his new obsession, dark-cabaret. Their full-length debut, Anthology Archive, was released in a limited edition (250 copies) in the United States.

A change of course

The final chapter of an ideal trilogy on sex and desire, 10 Neurotics marks the return of the invaluable project that Sam Rosenthal has been the mind and soul of since 1986. But where in the previous chapters of the trilogy the "carnal" concept was filtered now through an austere religious aura (This Lush Garden Within), now through a romantic approach (the masterpiece As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire), 10 Neurotics throws itself naked and raw into a whirlwind of stories, encounters and erotic visions.
It's the album that marks a profound change in the Black Tape project. First of all, the revamped line-up Rosenthal assembled for the occasion, with new singers Laurie Reade (ex-Attrition) and Athan Maroulis (already a guest on two tracks of The Scavenger Bride) and above all the decisive contribution of Brian Viglione, already a prodigious drummer with Dresden Dolls. Forget the depth of the gothic-ambient drones, now Black Tape's music is devoted to what Rosenthal himself has called dark-cabaret, a mixture of burlesque, gothic, folk, rock and more besides.
The new form, however, doesn't suit Rosenthal very well. Tracks like the clumsy opener "Sailor Boy" or "The Pleasure In The Pain" convince little if at all. The gambit works better when shreds of the old magic manage to emerge from the footlights: the magnificent "Inch Worm" is the best proof of this, a touching, gripping melody, ethereal vocal interplay. The self-cover of "Tell Me You've Taken Another" is the enjoyable manifesto of the new direction, while guests Lucas Lanthier (Cinema Strange and Deadfly Ensemble) and Nicki Jaine (singer of Revue Noir) feel right at home in the chiaroscuro of "Curious Yet Ashamed" and the Weimar-style drapery of the elegant "Rotten Zurich Cafè." But tellingly, the two numbers that stir real emotion in the end are tied to the band's usual style, namely the hypnotic "The Perfect Pervert" and "Marmalade Cat."
10 Neurotics earns admiration mostly for the courage Rosenthal shows in shaking up a standard of quality as beloved as it was unsurpassable. Credit for the willingness to take a risk, but the usual narrative flair gets lost in the stylistic uncertainty of a new path whose foundations still seem rather shaky.

Away from his main project, Rosenthal returns two years later to cultivate his passion for ambient music on The Passage. In the scant three-quarters of an hour of the title track, Rosenthal picks back up the eponymous composition that closed the wonderful As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire, dissecting its most intimate essence and stretching out every detail, injecting streams of sound into every crevice of silence. What emerges is a mammoth symphony of rarefied ambient soundscapes, on a par with the best work of a Thom Brennan at the height of his powers (the same Brennan who in 2001 gave birth to the masterpiece "Vibrant Water"). Throughout the entire suite, the sound flow travels unperturbed and slowly through an abstract cosmos, absorbing here and there shifts in tone and the entrance or exit of one of its parts. Everything continues in a stillness that is disturbed only by the explosive, powerful finale of "Rae," where Vicki Richards' electric violin makes its entrance, broken up into a myriad of sound sequences and standing as a kind of landing, and the simultaneous end of the journey.

After the success of the drone experiment that was POD, Rosenthal confirms his skills as an ambient sculptor, already partly evident on Terrace Of Memories, definitively revealing a side of his artistic personality that has never managed to attract as much attention as his dark-gothic one.

With his majestic scores, closer to composers like Pärt and Górecki than to rock, Rosenthal has definitively expanded the boundaries of "gothic" music, transforming it from a dark, necrophilic expression of rock into a pictorial, classical art form with strong mystical overtones. An explorer of existence's darkest recesses, a poet-philosopher confronting indescribable realities and visions, which he nonetheless manages to translate through sounds shaped by an extraordinary musical sensibility, one that not even a long, acclaimed career has managed to dull in the slightest.

In 2013, Tenderotics marks the brand's important return, seeking to restore order where "10 Neurotics" had upset every balance. Fourteen remixes entrusted to some of the leading names on the Projekt roster, which on one hand confirm the bipolar setup that now defines the Black Tape project (translatable as Rosenthal + Viglione), and on the other try to gently mend the rifts with "old-school" fans, without abandoning its more recent frontiers in the process.

The imperfect performances can be counted on one hand, and their only flaw is a clear lack of nerve: first among them is the version of "Inch Worm" by Attrition, essentially a full-on restatement of the original without the slightest addition. A similar problem afflicts "Rotten Zurich Café" by Valerie Gentile and, to a lesser extent, the opening "The Perfect Pervert," in which Erik Wøllo struggles to stand out on a track that was already excellent to begin with.
Elsewhere, the results are flattering when not outright astonishing: Sam Rosenthal himself contributes a trio of highly interesting instrumental digressions on the themes of the tracks already mentioned, looking to a dark esotericism on "Perfectpurity," to tribal frontiers on "Caughtstranger" (from "Caught By A Stranger") and to melancholy on "Zurichstrings," while even more successful is the drone-laden mix of "Istrike," in which he dusts off the moniker As Lonely As Dave Bowman.

The first to surprise, meanwhile, is Steve Roach, busy deconstructing and reassembling vocal samples drawn from various tracks on "Feel Your Pulse Quicken" and setting "Love Song" within a guitar desert. The boldest of all is Steve Jones with his "Milly Mix" entries, especially the already-released one of "Marmalade Cat," overhauled compared to the hermetic feel of the original. Rounding things off are an "Android Lust" on splendid form on the masterpiece "Tell Me You've Taken Another" – which far outclasses the self-cover on "10 Neurotics" – and Black Tape themselves, who rework in a minimal vein, once again alongside Wøllo, the title track of "Halo Star."

It's impossible to ask for more from a record born as a variation on a thorny, complex theme, which also manages the feat (no easy task with remixes) of sounding compact and cohesive, minimizing the choppiness typical of the compilation effect. Tenderotics is thus a work that represents both the current status of Black Tape For A Blue Girl and the range of interests Rosenthal has chosen to dwell on, the very same ones on which Projekt has built its artistic policy in recent years. A gift that will please those who have followed and continue to follow the American label, and one that has the undeniable merit of marking an important comeback.

In 2016, Rosenthal's long-awaited return under the Black Tape For A Blue Girl moniker, preceded by the EP "Limitless," shows a greater emphasis on the darker, more sorrowful sounds that had already characterized the project at its best in the 90s. The dive into the past is completed by the line-up as well: while Brian Viglione (ex-Dresden Dolls) was retained on drums, the long-awaited return of veteran singer Oscar Herrera, with his classic, solemn style, contributes significantly to the character of the songs, enriching them with bittersweet elegance. Alongside him is also his daughter Danielle Herrera, stirring and passionate: a presence that helps turn the songs into small gems immersed in darkness.
Titled These Fleeting Moments, not coincidentally sharing its name with the opening track of 1991's A Chaos Of Desire, the album is marked by an intense atmosphere stretched out to cover a full 70 minutes of pathos and melancholy; as if one were staring into a mirror and drowning in memories, giving oneself over to nostalgia. And "atmosphere" is indeed the key word that runs through the whole listen, via romantic, melancholic tones tinged with a mystical, ethereal, almost surreal aftertaste.
The inspiration is tangible right from the opening 17-minute suite "The Vastness Of Life," split into 5 movements dense with existentialism and powerful nostalgic emotions. This is probably the emotional, despairing peak of the album: funereal and deeply dark, both in its anguished lyrics and in the soundscapes built by the instruments (particularly Nick Shadow's viola).
There are moments where desolation gives way to a sweeter melancholy (above all "Affinity," with its tear-jerking keyboard carousel), or where it sublimates into a funereal gothic sound that's practically state-of-the-art (as on the instrumental "Please Don't Go," which is what bands like Lacrimosa have been vainly trying to score forever).
Other tracks instead stick to the conventions of goth-rock, like "Limitless" (brisk and elegant, straddling the 80s and the 2000s) or "One Promised Love" (which winks at the best of The Cure), while the pairing of the delicate, arabesque "Meditation On The Skeleton" and the pastoral "Desert-Rat Kangaroo" explores sounds à la Dead Can Dance. Also worth noting are the pleasant dark-folk solo of "Zug Köln" (played by guest Chase Dobson) and the sweetest touches of shoegaze and post-rock on "She's Gone" and especially "She Ran So Far Away That She Can No Longer Be Found," with its emotional crescendo. Despite these welcome shifts in register, the album still sounds cohesive from start to finish, always holding onto its own identity.

Less than 6 months later, Sam Rosenthal returns with a four-track EP, his first release of 2017. The tracks on offer had already been announced some time ago, as you can read for instance in the interview Rosenthal himself gave us last autumn. More EPs are planned, or at least enough material for the American artist to hope he can gather it all into a new album by the end of the year.
Continuing along the path set by the previous release, Blood On The Snow focuses on dark atmospheres built through elegant, mature arrangements. These are tracks that tend toward formula, but precisely because of that they reach a state of the art in terms of style and compositional polish.
"Rubicon" is intense and dramatic, its acoustic guitars joined in the finale by strings and percussion to generate an imposing atmosphere that underpins Oscar Herrera's expressive voice. "On Some Faraway Beach" revisits the keyboard melodies of "With My Sorrow" from the classic Remnants Of A Deeper Purity, but the solemnity of the original track now gives way to a softer, bittersweet melancholy that transfigures its mood. "Blood On The Snow I" is an aching, mesmerizing instrumental, perhaps a touch monotonous over time, but the repetitiveness of the sounds is necessary to make the atmospheres even more unsettling, and it never grows tiresome. Finally, the peak of evocative power is probably reached with the closing "The Apostate", where strings and electronic effects combine to showcase Oscar Herrera's vocal talent and experience even further.

With three decades of career behind him, Sam Rosenthal has carved out his own significant niche within the dark scene, where he operates with his usual personality and artistic maturity. 

In 2018, after no fewer than three works in two years, having left behind the three beautiful covers of women in fetal position housed within the cello-womb – with an alienating photo of porn star Mercy West on the cover heightening the sense of isolation and alienation – the band released their twelfth album, To Touch The Milky Way, which still retains that gothic ambient evocative power that has always defined Rosenthal's poetics. It's once again a journey somewhere between Dead Can Dance and extremely slowed-down landscapes, at times similar to the recent, widely praised Low album “Double Negative”, as in the two hyper-elongated endings of “I Close My Eyes And Watch The Galaxy Turning” and “Does Anything Remain?” (actually a long suite split into four parts), magnificent examples of gothic songwriting where the darkness keeps building all the way to the long, static finales, the culmination of Rosenthal's vision. It's a paradox that the power increases through slowness and stillness, but that's one of the hallmarks of Black Tape For A Blue Girl's music. 

When Rosenthal decides to pick up the pace, he does it perfectly on the closing track “To Touch The Milky Way”, with a piano pattern clearly indebted to Terry Riley, vaguely reminiscent of Baba O'Riley by the Who, which is then upended by the notes of a psychedelic electric guitar that quickly fades away to make room for a long closing passage of synth and harmonium, bringing the album full circle back to where it began. In between we find the shorter pieces: the piano-and-voice song “In My Memories”, the refined pop ballads “The Stars” and “All Of The Things I Wanted”, and the strings caught between modern classical and gothic Nicoon “On Some Faraway Beach”. 

Everything is perfect, everything more or less familiar but still charged with emotion: the explorer of the darkest recesses of our existence doesn't let us down.

In 2021 came The Cleft Serpent. The work stands as a complementary follow-up to the fine previous To Touch the Milky Way, whose title track also gets a rearrangement here. Both records strike with intense emotion and tragic tones, building deep soundscapes in which the sound is slowed and stretched out to emphasize its expressive charge. The main difference can be summed up by saying that, rather than monumental compositions with solemn peaks cracked open by a certain sense of anguish and sublimity, the evocative power of "The Cleft Serpent" becomes more earthbound and desolate, almost left to fend for itself. The 2018 album painted celestial suggestions to push the listener toward self-reflection; this new work strips things down and starts from introspection to explore the surrounding world and humanity at large. Sam Rosenthal's touch as a writer is as personal as ever. The tracks consist of minimalist orchestral scores for cello and keyboard, in some cases verging on mannerism, where the arrangements themselves effectively become the song. Rising above them is the voice of new collaborator Jon DeRosa, mournful and low like that of Brendan Perry, whose timbre is indeed similar. His is the only voice featured, lending the record unity and cohesion. At times one feels the absence of other voices (a female one, in particular, is missing) that, with their variety, have always made the American composer's music more eclectic and colorful; on the other hand, on this occasion they might have broken the album's flow. The tracks have their highs and lows: some are poignant and moving (the title track, "The Trickster", "Ares & Hermes"), others perhaps too predictable and repetitive (in particular the revisiting of "To Touch the Milky Way", well-crafted but giving the impression of being filler, and the ambitious but overly drawn-out "So Tired of Our History"). All in all, it's yet another welcome reconfirmation of Sam Rosenthal working within his own distinctive, imaginative and detailed trademark style, though within his discography it ranks as a minor work. 

Contributions by Roberto Mandolini, Matteo Meda ("The Passage", "Tenderotics"), Alessandro Mattedi ("These Fleeting Moments", "Blood On The Snow" and "The Cleft Serpent"), Valerio D'onofrio ("To Touch The Milky Way")

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