Composer, musician, and author Sam Rosenthal established and directs both the pioneering darkwave ensemble Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Projekt Records, recognized as one of the leading American imprints devoted to ethereal, gothic, and ambient sounds. He launched the imprint specifically to issue his personal electronic explorations, among them the 1985 LP Tanzmusik. Black Tape for a Blue Girl came together in 1986; over time its aesthetic developed into an ornate fusion of neo-classical, goth, folk, and ambient elements. Once the group’s initial recordings gained traction, Projekt expanded its roster to include other notable darkwave outfits such as Attrition and Lycia, while broadening its scope to embrace shoegaze, new age, world fusion, dark cabaret, and additional styles. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s, Rosenthal issued space-music and drone works both under the alias As Lonely as Dave Bowman and under his own name, among them The Passage (2011) and joint efforts with Steve Roach and Mark Seelig.
Prior to any commercial releases, Rosenthal—then residing in South Florida—launched the fanzine Alternative Rhythms in 1981, years before “alternative” became common shorthand for non-mainstream music. He started Projekt as a cassette-only operation in 1983, circulating his own ambient and experimental pieces alongside collections of electronic artists from Florida. The label’s debut vinyl pressing arrived in 1985 with Tanzmusik, a minimal-synth album that Rosenthal recorded under the pseudonym Projekt Electronic Amerika.
Following his relocation to California in 1986—the same year Alternative Rhythms ended—Rosenthal assembled Black Tape for a Blue Girl and released its spare art-pop debut, The Rope. He continued issuing occasional solo cassettes through the remainder of the decade, yet the steadily expanding ambitions of Black Tape for a Blue Girl soon claimed his primary attention. After the appearance of well-regarded albums such as A Chaos of Desire (1991) and Remnants of a Deeper Purity (1996), the band played its inaugural concert at Projekt Festival in Chicago, then the label’s headquarters, in 1996. By then Projekt operated as a fully commercial enterprise, regularly presenting recordings by an array of artists that included Vidna Obmana, Lovesliescrushing, and Autopsia, while also handling distribution for overseas imprints such as Cold Meat Industry and Hyperium Records through its Projekt: Darkwave mail-order division.
At the close of 1999, Rosenthal and Projekt moved to New York City. The next year he made the 1986 cassette Before the Buildings Fell available on CD for the first time. Black Tape for a Blue Girl adopted a dark-cabaret approach on 2004’s Halo Star; concurrently Rosenthal formed Revue Noir alongside vocalist/guitarist Nicki Jaine, issuing an EP and touring extensively in 2005. In 2007 he released Pod, the inaugural album from his ambient-drone project As Lonely as Dave Bowman, conceived as a tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Returning to solo ambient work, he issued The Passage in 2011, built largely around a reworked 1998 composition. Tanzmusik received a vinyl reissue from Mannequin in 2012 and became digitally accessible for the first time, now listed under Rosenthal’s own name.
He settled in Portland, Oregon, in 2013 and thereafter turned to crowdfunding platforms to support both his recordings and the label. A second As Lonely as Dave Bowman album, Monolith, surfaced in 2015. Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s 2016 release These Fleeting Moments signaled a reversion to the group’s earlier ethereal aesthetic. Before the decade concluded, Rosenthal completed two ambient/new-age collaborations: 2017’s Journey to Aktehi with Mark Seelig and 2019’s The Gesture of History with Nick Shadow and Steve Roach.
