Rosenthal, Sam

Artist: Sam Rosenthal & Mark Seelig
P: 2017
Sam Rosenthal: Songwriter and keyboardist from the band Black Tape For A Blue Girl Mark Seelig: Solo artist, transpersonal psychotherapist, and shamanic practitioner
On the border between electronic spacemusic and organic indigenous music, this release is an exhilarating and ecstatic exploration of the subjective land of Aktehi. The primary ingredients in the hallucinogenic soundscapes are Seelig’s Bansuri flute and harmonic chanting. Rosenthal’s subtle electronics, processing and production creates space for the mind-expanding travel akin to an altered state of consciousness.
“This album is alarmingly beautiful and unreal. As if the musicians have been given notes by something we don’t see in the physical realm.” – Matt Rowe, MusicTap
Envisioned as a psychedelic trip with the flute and chants of the shamanic main character leading the listener on a journey of sound, Journey to Aktehi is a three-part meditation free of percussive rhythms. The sonic textures intricately expand and develop, supporting water, flute, breath, and (overtone) voice. Unlike similar works that maintain a steady-state throughout each track, these pieces take flight and explore; the artists incorporate new elements along the way to maintain a fresh, vibrant experience from beginning to end.?
“When I began this collaboration with Mark,” Sam reflects, “my desire was to take the listener into non-ordinary reality, a crossing into an imagined mountainous desert region I named ‘Aktehi.’ Mark’s intense voice and expressive flute provide the lift out of our consensus belief system. His performance becomes both the environment and the spiritbody for the shamanic character illustrated on the cover. With his ally animals and totems, he leads us into water canyons and up windy steppes where we undertake initiative inward examination as the music’s power takes hold.”
“Rosenthal’s collaboration with Seelig blends a strange union of that which is electric, and that which is fashioned by nature. Mixed with unworldly chant, that blend feels like a restorative gateway: a return to what we once were and should be now.” – Matt Rowe, MusicTap
Journey to Aktehi serves as admission to another realm: a psychoactive musical experience with a transportive effect upon consciousness.
For fans of: The Mahabharata Soundtrack, Djivan Gasparyan, Alio Die Cover illustrations: Oscar Herrera, vocalist for Black Tape For A Blue Girl

Artist: Sam Rosenthal
P: 2011
The Passage is a foray into the realms of pure ambient, in the spirit of Steve's Immersion series, from Black Tape For A Blue Girl founder/songwriter Sam Rosenthal. The two pieces on the hour-long album submerge the listener in a self-sustaining environment of warm electronics and minimal processings of deep, tender swells and an unresolved, yearning string theme. This is music which gently rotates around its own axis in a time-suspended haze.
The track "The Passage" originated as the blissed-out sixteen-minute closer to 1999's Blacktape CD, As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire. It would take over a decade for the composition to resurface when Rosenthal began work on the score for Mark A. Michaels & Patricia Johnson's guided-meditation set, Ananda Nidra. Rosenthal extended the already expansive original to an even more immersive forty-four minutes, serving as the score behind Michael's guidance. "When I muted Mark's track in the studio," Rosenthal remembers, "I discovered the piece had evolved into an intimate, personal and subtle soundscape. I wanted others to hear it on its own."
Without Ananda Nidra's vocal track, "The Passage" now feels like a gentle echo of the inner silence experienced during meditation. By working with a handful of sonic elements gently evolving over time, Rosenthal changes the emphasis ever so slightly. The vast field of harmonious resonance and granular sound move gradually and languidly, time stretching and evolving, rolling back into itself - very much in the vein of Rosenthal's favorite Discrete Music by Brian Eno.
On The Passage, everything hinges on the comforting arrival, dissolution and re-appearance of events, on motifs meeting and departing, thematic strands isolated from the current of sounds, drifting and freely floating for minutes on end, before ultimately flowing together again, like tacit tributaries re-entering the stream.
While "The Passage" revels in a slow motion dance on the far side of the infinite, "Rae," the last ten minutes of the album, adds a new element to the work. Stacking the shimmering harmonics of long-standing Blacktape collaborator and violinist Vicki Richards into a sonorous cathedral dome, "Rae" spirals higher and higher before fading away into a grateful silence. Streaks of strings coalesce into a passionate, romantic tone poem, an inviting, fragile melody. After the preceding forty-five minutes of deepness, these basically subtle timbral and compositional changes stand out as an affirmative response to the ocean of questions raised earlier. "Adding 'Rae' as a conclusion brings the cycle to a close for now," suggests Rosenthal, "It is an emotional release, the passage from this conditional state to the next. A moment of transition."
For Rosenthal, the album is an expression of his need for calm in a personal hurricane of noise, turbulence and rapid changes: "The Passage has been therapeutic for me," Rosenthal says. "I resurfaced, resurrected, remixed and reworked this piece into the sort of ambient album I love to listen to in my own quiet time. It serves as a call to deeply enter the slow flow of sound as well as an invitation to let the textures inhabit and transform the space around you. Reprocessing this material as the score for Mark's guided meditation erased the noise of the everyday world while allowing me time to heal. It helped me set free both fears and beautiful possibilities, settling in on a calming sense of release."
"The Passage" returns, dramatically refined and enhanced, accompanied by the new, complementary track "Rae." It brings the narrative of Rosenthal's art to a new point; and in that, it is the beginning of a new chapter in his creative possibilities.

Artist: Sam Rosenthal / Nick Shadow / Steve Roach
P: 2019
The Gesture of History draws upon introspective passages where the organic texture and emotions of the viola play out over an atmosphere of engulfing mournful beauty. Delicate strings float upon shimmering, forever changing expressionistic backgrounds of processed viola, synth, and harmonium – profoundly sensitive and deeply moving. The modernist ambient compositions balance on the precipice looking back in moments of reflection and rumination while delicately holding the future in our hands.

Artist: Sam Rosenthal,Steve Roach,B. Metcalf,
B.Parnham u.a.
P: 2020
It's the centennial of Timothy Leary's birth; to commemorate, Projekt Records founder Sam Rosenthal recorded Tim, where are you now? an electronic space music/art rock collaboration. The album celebrates a pioneer of consciousness expansion using his own words accompanied by international artists exploring those same realms via their music.Rosenthal collaborated with Projekt space music artists Steve Roach, Erik Wollo, Mark Seelig, Forrest Fang, and others, and recorded Timothy Leary trip narrations from Alex Cox (director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy), Reggie Watts (bandleader on CBS' The Late Late Show with James Corden), Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) and others.With the permission and encouragement of Timothy Leary's son Zach and the Leary estate, the album's 13 tracks contain 4 spoken word "trips" with text excerpted and cut-up from Tim's first LSD and DMT experiences chronicled in his 1968 book High Priest.As founder of 37-year-old Portland-based Projekt Records, Rosenthal helms the label as well as his band Black Tape For A Blue Girl (with 12 albums in the gothic, ambient & art rock genres). Synthesist, songwriter, lyricist and main collaborator, he's released 8 albums of his music in the last half-decade. For Tim, where are you now? Rosenthal collected musical textures & sources from Projekt label electronic artists, sonically painting with their colors and his ethereal electronics to create the concept album he envisioned."Tim was a chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives." - Hunter S. Thompson.