Black Tape For A Blue Girl

“Traces of a deeper purity”: that's how we might translate the title of this album by Black Tape For A Blue Girl, an album that only one adjective can fully capture: immense. This is because we're facing one of the most “abyssal” moments in the entire history of music, one of those moments in which all the possible earthly implications of our wandering take on more “original” connotations, and, indeed, a more essential purity. One gets the impression that, within the folds of this sublime artistic gesture (in the Brechtian sense), music returns to its one and only truth: the truth whereby it becomes the totally and absolutely authentic voice of the dark, chaotic depths that underpin the unsettling unfolding of existence. Sam Rosenthal's compositions, in fact, seem to reveal the intensity and eternity of the fire that stirs beneath the apparently placid surface of reality. The song form is thus dissolved by the apocalyptic whirl of a musical format that derives, through successive syntheses, from the perfect interpenetration of dark sensibility and the austerity of chamber classical music. Onto this basic canvas are grafted the solemn voices of “singers” like Oscar Herrera and Lucian Casselman, wonderfully at ease amid these blinding scores of the unknown.

The lowest point – in the sense of “deepest” – of this ritual of the absolute and the mysterious comes 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 keyboards spread their menacing drones, while Vicky Richards's 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 the cosmic void. Mera Roberts's cello, too, helps heighten the sense of overflowing pathos that pervades almost every corner of the record.

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 impenetrable divine symbols, in whose contemplation "Wings Tattered, Fallen" takes shape, an ambient exercise with subtly mystical overtones. The grandiloquent enchantment of "Redefine Pure Faith" closes with a tender piano sonata, a prelude to the tragedy-streaked sweetness of "Fin De Siécle". "With My Sorrows" is another great vocal showcase for Herrera, while "Fitful" brings back cosmic flashes complete with "treated" vocals (Casselman). The only track that comes close to a traditional song form is the title track, though in a thoroughly peculiar way. The mournful piano notes of "Again, To Drift (For Veronika)" reinforce the not-so-faint ties to certain elements of the dreamiest new-age music. At this point, all that's left is the minimalism of "I Have No More Answers", in which Casselman reaches one of the highest points of her anguished delivery. The long coda of drones and hazy echoes is the open space overlooking the clearing of the world, observed without prejudice and without fear, but with an infinite sorrow, and without any redemption at all.

Rosenthal's "negative" philosophy found its most intense artistic counterpart in these 77 minutes of indelible emotion, confirming, among other things, the old axiom that art is the only cure capable of remedying the sickness of existence. The fall into time - as Cioran called it - has indeed condemned man to the experience of his own fragility, but, in turn, has also granted him the possibility of probing its mystery, in an attempt to clarify the enigma of life. This attempt, doomed to fail precisely because it is conducted from a human, and therefore "finite", perspective, finds its pivotal moment in the instant of creation, whose sole purpose is to let Truth present itself as an "event", and thus become accessible to man (even if only for a few, infinitesimal moments...). Of all this, "Remnants Of A Deeper Purity" is a shining, majestic, unforgettable example.

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27/10/2006