| Profile: Black Tape For A Blue Girl | ||
| Black Tape For A Blue Girl has incorporated a variety of musicians and vocalists over the band's seven albums. Stylistically associated with acts such as Dead Can Dance, Miranda Sex Garden and This Mortal Coil and influenced by the art of Marcel Duchamp, the writings of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch and the music of Prokofiev, Black Tape For A Blue Girl uses lush instrumentation to create music for an audience dreaming while wide awake. Synthesizers, live symphonic strings and flute meld with dreamy vocals into a moody soundscape. | |
| Among their many live credits, Black Tape For A Blue Girl performed at the 6 November 1999 Gathering in Philadelphia. For this concert, the group focused on the ambient, introspective side of their sound. Joining founder and synthesist Sam Rosenthal was Lisa Feuer performing on flute, Elysabeth Grant on vocals and viola plus World Music violinist Vicki Richards made a rare live appearance with Black Tape at the Gathering. | 
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 "Black Tape For A Blue Girl's ethereal, mournful sound virtually defined the darkwave aesthetic of their label Projekt Records, a company owned and operated by the group's founder, composer and keyboardist Sam Rosenthal. Formed in 1983, Projekt was originally envisioned as an outlet for Rosenthal's solo electronic music; upon relocating to California three years later, his music adopted a warmer, deeply personal sound heralded by the formation of Black Tape For A Blue Girl, which debuted in 1986 with The Rope. Where subsequent efforts including 1987's Mesmerized by the Sirens and its 1989 follow-up Ashes in the Brittle Air drew heavily on ambient soundscapes, the group -- a revolving ensemble of performers that in addition to Rosenthal also at times included vocalists Oscar Herrera and Lucien Casselman, violinist Vicki Richards, clarinetist Richard Watson and cellist Mera Roberts -- expanded into increasingly dense electronic textures over the course of records like 1991's A Choas of Desire and 1993's This Lush Garden Within. After a three-year hiatus, Black Tape For A Blue Girl resurfaced in 1996 with the EP The First Pain to Linger, a disc packaged with a novel authored by Rosenthal; the full-length epic Remnants of a Deeper Purity appeared that same year, followed in 1998 by As On Aflame Laid Bare By Desire.
-- Jason Ankeny All Music Guide | ||
"A lot of As One Aflame is damn near brilliant in its artistic reach and dramatic scope. With otherworldly electronics, lone violin and weeping flute all draped around the solemn whispers of Rosenthal (and the evocative voices of Julianna Towns and Oscar Herrera), black tape provides a most ghostly encounter. At times, Black Tape echoes the romantic indulgence of This Mortal Coil, with haunting female vocals and ornate neoclassicism juxtaposed against an ominous, frozen landscape of strings and keyboards; Rosenthal's art achieves both an eerie sonic calm and an intense degree of emotional extravagance. As one aflame can't be dismissed as a misguided attempt to invigorate the well-perserved corpse of the darkwave. This stuff is quite guided and very much alive."
-- MAGNET | ||
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