Black Tape For A Blue Girl

Rosenthal is the brain behind Black Tape For A Blue Girl and their challenging theme-based albums: Rosenthal writes the lyrics, crafts electronic and acoustic arrangements, and usually directs the voices of singers such as Oscar Herrera.

The evil influence of British goth-rock is still pervasive on BTFABG's first album, The Rope (Projekt, 1986). The album is divided in two parts, one sung and one instrumental, as if, at this point in time, the composer had not quite decided which way to go. The "songs" sound rather amateurish (the best possibly being Within These Walls). On the other hand, the ambient pieces (the dense, symphonic texture and soaring melody of The Few Remaining Threads, the pastoral Pachelbel-inspired The Lingering Flicker, the cosmic lull of Slow Blur) were laying the foundations for Rosenthal's musical future.

Sam Rosenthal also recorded an album under his own name, Before The Buildings Fell (1986 - Projekt, 2000). The pulsating, minimalistic 9-minute Kathryn and the 15-minute Fragments of Benediction hark back to Klaus Schulze's cosmic impressionism and to Steve Roach's early "poemes electroniques". The 10-minute The Amber Girl has the spiritual quality of Constance Demby's Bach-inspired new age music. While mostly a beginner's work, this album shows Rosenthal exploring psychological textures and painting distant soundscapes. The turning point will be when those distant soundscapes will be transformed into interior mindscapes. That evolution started the following year with Mesmerized By The Sirens.

Mesmerized By The Sirens (Projekt, 1987), later partially remixed for the CD reissue, marks an escalation of special effects. Rosenthal is not merely a monk sinisterly entwined with his organ. He is also an avant-garde composer, who in A Teardrop Left Behind weaves superb ballads for chamber ensemble and atmospheric electronics, and in With A Million Tears dissects the harmonics of Harold Budd’s ambient music. The female voice that intones the opening and closing hymns, Jamais Pars and Seireenien Lumoama, seals the transition from gently folk and Renaissance tones to gloomily religious ones. Too intellectual, perhaps, to be true art, but inward enough to be true emotion.

Rosenthal made the leap to a much more professional kind of music with Ashes In The Brittle Air (Projekt, 1989). Rosenthal composes his music at the keyboards, then writes the vocal parts for two voices (one male and one female), and finally layers instruments played by occasional collaborators. Rosenthal’s gothic already transcends the genre: the title track is an ethereal folk ballad immersed in a dreamlike atmosphere; Across A Thousand Blades is related to the more pompous dark-punk of Siouxsee Sioux; The Touch And The Darkness falls into a catatonic trance akin to psychedelic dilation. The most dreadful horror is The Scar Of A Poet, seven minutes of noises from the afterlife, symphonic snippets, macabre music boxes, and exotic processions. The second part of the album is his experimental laboratory. From The Tightrope lets instrumental timbres float freely, vocals are unrestrained, and the electronics unfold in long “ambient” phrases. Am I So Deceived marries a menacing symphonic vigor to the minimalism of Eno’s instrumental vignettes. I Ran To You resembles one of those vocal-electronic breaths of Enya. Ashes too is a transitional album, still constrained by ballads, but Rosenthal’s stature as a composer is becoming ever clearer.

A Chaos Of Desire (Projekt, 1991) is the true continuation of the chamber project begun with Mesmerized. Among the collaborators are Padraic Ogl (of Thanatos), Oscar Herrera, and several female singers, including Julianna Towns (of Skinner Box). The work opens with the ethereal vocalises of These Fleeting Moments, which drift in gently cyclical electronics, in the manner of Eno’s ambient works. The ghost of Nico haunts the funereal organ requiem of the title track and the spectral madrigal Tear Love From My Mind, sung with gentle despair by another soprano. These intense, hallucinatory “mysteries” are the moments of greatest pathos on the record. A nearly pictorial quality can be felt, as if they were Renaissance frescoes, in pieces like We Watch Our Sad-Eyed Angel Fall, steeped in infinite melancholy. Rosenthal is equally skilled at probing the darkest abysses of the human soul. A nervous and menacing symphonism counterpoints the high declamation—halfway between psychoanalytic nightmare and Greek tragedy—of The Hypocrite Is Me, a multi-movement suite worthy of avant-garde music that closes with a poignant violin theme. The instrumental scores are limited by their mystical/gothic premises, but Rosenthal lets himself loose in Beneath The Icy Floe, cosmic music for violin and electronics that harks back to early Klaus Schulze, to Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra, and so on. Even more angelic is Of These Reminders, just a step away from new age. With this work, Rosenthal reaches full maturity—as a composer, arranger, and orchestra director. Gothic has become an art of distant suggestion, of mental painting.

Terrace Of Memories (Projekt, 1992) was a collaboration with Vidna Obmana.

This Lush Garden Within (1993) is an ethereal work that (on the negative side) recycles stereotypes of the previous albums and (on the positive side) shows a stronger neoclassical quality. After Left Unsaid sets the ghostly ambience of the album with an otherwordly whisper and melancholy piano notes, the baroque lament of The Broken Glass and the middle-eastern cakewalk We Exist Entwined (which basically define the territory for the rest of the selection), the album reaches an early emotional peak with the celestial moaning a` la Morricone of Overwhelmed Beneath Me. The instrumental The Christ in the Desert is Rosenthal at his best, atmospheric, cryptic, metaphysical, letting noises tell a story that noone can understand. The album indulges in gentle madrigals such as The Flow of Our Spirit and the elegant, mournful Our Future Imagined, that stick to a more conventional song format and merely repeat the idea of The Broken Glass. The most original of the female vocals is the brief Gravity's Angel, in which the singer mumbles childish verses and the music is only bells and ominous echoes. In The Turbulence and the Torment, the female voice utters undecipherable words that are refracted against a wall of wavering electronics, as if wandering in a maze.
These feminine songs alternate with numbers that, following the example of We Exist Entwined, wed exotic, dance and macabre tones, such as the choir of dead souls of Into The Garden.
This is a transitional album, whose drawback are a few very weak and predictable tracks and a generally dejavu concept.

Remnants Of A Deeper Purity (Projekt, 1996), the sixth album but the first in three years, follows The First Pain To Linger (Projekt, 1996), a collector’s package including a book (85 pages of short fragments of lyrical prose) and a mini-CD with six songs (four previously released and two new ambient pieces).
Rosenthal returns with a work of great scope and emotional resonance. His melancholy madrigals, set in dark and desolate landscapes and performed with the composure and austerity of sacred classical music, recall the experiments of the greatest rock priestess of all time, Nico. The arrangements for cello and violin (often just minimalist phrases repeated at regular intervals) emphasize the forlorn atmosphere of the electronics. At the center of the music are not the litanies of eternal damnation (sung by Oscar Herrera and Lucian Casselman), but rather the long, low, and nuanced drones of Rosenthal’s keyboards. The celestial harmonies that cyclically chase each other in Redefine Pure Faith, the decadently sweet air of Fin De Siecle, and the chant for muezzin and string quartet in With My Sorrows make the (bare) scenography both the dramatic core and its inverse. The most dramatic ceremony unfolds in the twenty-four minutes of For You Will Burn Your Wings Upon The Sun, a kind of concerto in five movements: a grandiose theme for the two singers over a martial rhythm of medieval drums, a subdued adagio for strings, a piece for drones of electronics and strings, a symphonic apotheosis à la Strauss, and a whispered mantra for strings. Another moment of supreme contemplation is I Have No More Answers, ten minutes of Enya-like trance immersed in a sea of minimalist chimes. From gothic territory, Rosenthal moves toward the realm of trance—already explored on the previous CD—with the gentle and somber ambient music of Wings Tattered (“ambient requiem”?) and the ethereal swirls of Fitful, or even with the new-age piano sonata Again To Drift, featuring the most accessible melody.
Amid so much magical music, Rosenthal’s lucidly negative philosophy shines darkly—the awareness of a web of genetic codes binding man to his environment and destiny, the faith in the imprisonment of the mind, and the sorrow for the transience of the universe. More than ever, the miracle stands out of how such a poor lexicon can generate such a vast iconographic apparatus.

With My Sorrows (Amplexus, 1997) is a brief (twenty-minute) introduction to his art for those who may have missed his major works.

Remnants Of A Deeper Purity was the masterpiece of Black Tape For A Blue Girl, and possibly the masterpiece of all of gothic music. The 2006 double-disc re-issue includes the neoclassical 10" mini-album With My Sorrows (Amplexus, 1997). The 13-minute second movement (following a brief medieval-style hymn) is a concentrate of weeping strings leading to the soaring Bach-ian aria of the third movement.

As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire (Projekt, 1998) is another 70-minute ritual that reaches deep into the human psyche. The title-track is divided in two parts: the first part is a monastery-style canon for two male voices on a somber Japanese-style score for string instruments; the second part is a classically cadenced madrigal for female voice, counterpointed by other female voices. The duet is a metaphysical ouverture for Rosenthal's new concept album, richly embellished with flutes, violin, cello, clarinet, harpsichord and electronics.
Violin, flute and a guitar strummed like a hardpsichord grace the solemn melody of Given, which soars slowly in its elegant setting. Violin, hardpsichord and harmonium build up tremendous tension in Denouement/ Denouncement. And the harmony only gets more and more complex, more and more abstract.
The "borders" of Rosenthal's style are no less intriguing. When the tragic overtones prevail, as in Tell Me You've Taken Another, the music stradles a territory between King Crimson's early romantic rock and the Pet Shop Boys' freudian synth-pop. The Apotheosis is an instrumental piece that mixes samples of natural sounds, melodic waves and a dramatic crescendo in the new agey style of Kitaro. The delicate, tender melody of Dulcimea flows in the spirit of Enya's celtic lullabys. Russia begins like a piano sonata and ends like one of those archaic and icey, harmonium-paced Nico songs (although here it's a duet).
Notwithstanding a 15-minute nightmare instrumental meditation, The Passage, which is barely "whispered" by the keyboards like a sub-ambient soundtrack, and could well represent a new direction for Rosenthal's art, nothing here even approaches the intensity of For You Will Burn Your Wings Upon The Sun. It is the very experimental overall sound of the album that makes it as haunting and as challening as any of his previous endeavours. Several short instrumental "intermezzos" (culminating in the longer The Green Box, a dark symphonic piece) as well as an ethereal Dream for free-form female harmonizing and dissonant string section actually testify to Rosenthal's compositional maturity like nothing had before.

The Scavenger Bride (Projekt, 2002), ostensibly dedicated to Kafka, is another exercise in sumptuous beauty. The ouverture is a thick slab of electronic drones and cello melodies, akin to Constance Demby's "sacred space music". Then Elysabeth Grant intones Kinski, a sparse hymn rendered in a mix of renaissance-style cantillating and Brecht-ian ostentation. The theatrical tone returns in the sensual, piano-based lullaby Shadow Of A Doubt (a Sonic Youth number), that grows into a climatic, nightmarish crescendo, and the recurrent theme of insanity reaches an apex with The Scavenger's Daughter, a mournful psalm set to the ticking of a piano and to a thick symphonic drone (and possibly the standout of the album).
The lively All My Lovers rides the tempo of a medieval saltarello and displays impeccable group counterpoint. Similar classical-sounding, chamber accompaniment highlights several of the compositions. Vicki Richards' violin, Lisa Feuer's flute, Julia Kent's cello, dulcimer, mandolin and piano contribute in no small amount to the appeal of the music.
Rosenthal employs a male singer to drench A Livery Of Bachelors in a dark, decadent, "mitteleuropean" ambience, falling halfway between Roxy Music and Pet Shop Boys. Another male singer delivers The Lie Which Refuses To Die in a calmer, slightly neurotic tone.
Like A Dog is the tour de force of the album. It opens with ominous nebulae of drones and a raga-like lament by the electric violin. Electronic master Steve Roach spreads rattling noises around, while Rosenthal builds up a majestic wall of electronics. Martin Bowes' recital dusts off the stigmata of ceremonial gothic music, aptly accompanied by martial and gloomy sounds.
The album ends with the solemn requiem of Bastille Day 1961. It is sung against the backdrop of a piano humming a tender melody, worthy of a Beethoven sonata, that dissolves in aquatic reverbs.
Some of the brief interludes (The Doorkeeper, Das Liselottenbett) are worth the price alone.
While on a smaller scale than Laid Bare By Desire, Sam Rosenthal has composed another austere and suave collection of lieder, each finely textured and magically vibrant.

Black Tape For A Blue Girl continued their gothic saga on mediocre collections like Halo Star (2004) and 10 Neurotics (2009), featuring Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls and guest vocalists such as Athan Maroulis (Spahn Ranch), Laurie Reade (Attrition) & Nicki Jaine. The latter flirts with cabaret-tish tones in songs like Sailor Boy, Curious Yet Ashamed and Inch Worm, save resuming the funereal tone in In Dystopia and Marmalade Cat. There are certainly an impressive number of elegant melodies in Rosenthal's catalogue.

Pod (2007) is a side-project of ambient music by Sam Rosenthal.

Black Tape For a Blue Girl returned with These Fleeting Moments (2016), another tribute to gothic rock and dark wave of the 1990s especially since it features again original vocalist Oscar Herrera next to viola player Nick Shadow and drummer Brian Viglione. The 17-minute The Vastness of Life opens with a tedious litany but then becomes a melancholy neoclassical sonata. The theatrical singing at the beginning and at the end of the piece evokes an expressionist cabaret of the 1920s. The ten-minute Meditation on the Skeleton feels more like a Buddhist invocation. The other (shorter) eleven songs include pagan folk (One Promised Love), ambient instrumentals, medieval dances (Zug Koln), symphonic psychedelia (She Ran so Far Away that she no Longer can be Found)

Eating Rose Petals (2020) was a collaboration with Aarktica and contains three lengthy pieces: Fleeting Rose Petals (18:59), Eating Rose Petals (10:52) and Valley of the Roses (8:06).

To Touch The Milky Way (2018) is an album of organ-driven gothic psalms. The slow pace, majestic drones and soothing melodies of I Close My Eyes and Watch the Galaxy Turning (9:00) seamlessly segue into Does Anything Remain? (9:59) and it waves of organ drones for a gran total of 19 minutes. The weak element is the singing that detracts from the otherworldly atmosphere. The other ambitious composition, To Touch the Milky Way (8:12), is vastly inferior, as are the shorter songs. A recurring problem of the project is that the significant compositions are released on albums full of insignificant ones.

The Cleft Serpent (2021) is instead a collection of neoclassical lieder (Jon DeRosa on vocals and Henrik Meierkord on cello besides Rosenthal's keyboards), unfortunately rather uneventful.