As Lonely As Dave Bowman
POD (black tape for a blue girl)
Electronic release from Projekt and black tape for a blue girl founder Sam Rosenthal.
POD brings a new and chilling element to the ambient music genre known as drone. Inspired by the vast isolation of cold, dark space, the absence of human civilization, and the texture of pure sound, there is a curiosity and fascination with those forces that leads to discovery. As Lonely as Dave Bowman becomes a pioneer in the next stage of ambient drone.
With a chillingly isolated core of sound that detaches and draws back into itself like droplets of mercury, POD crafts a singular sound of metaphoric loneliness that is not just a strand that drifts through space but is an enveloping, permeating cloud. It travels in an infinite trajectory, exploring the realm of the unknown as if a breathing entity, expanding and contracting into eternity. It eventually evolves into a robotic drone, a swarm of emotion and memory.
As Lonely as Dave Bowman is an electronic space music deep-ambient side-project from Sam Rosenthal, Projekt and black tape for a blue girl founder. The images came first. Sam's young son Sasha took the photos one afternoon while playing with Sam's camera. Noticing they were striking enough to be an album cover, Sam decided to create a musical world to compliment the amorphous look the photos captured. Inspired by Sasha's love for the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Sam worked in the studio in new and organic ways. Forsaking his usual melodic and lyrical approach to song-writing, he quickly developed musical pieces that are principally texture and spacial landscapes, created from a meaningful flow of synthetically produced loops and old-fashioned outboard effects.
Is the limitless expanse of space outside the realm of the planet Earth a selective environment for life or is it a cold, dark vacuum that leaves only unimagined emptiness in its wake? Will long periods of separation from humanity support the explorer or will it birth a long, never-ending core of loneliness with tendrils that reach Earth, wrapping its inhabitants in despair and uncertainty? POD provides shape and essence to these philosophical questions that permeate our thinking selves with unanswerable possibilities. The sound ponders the moment and the eternity that extends beyond it, developing a continuous flow that goes on forever in swells and ebbs like an ocean of time.
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A review from E/I:
Projekt prime minister Sam Rosenthal shucks his Black Tape for a Blue Girl goth melancholies for an equally forlorn side project of ambient/drone miasma. Actually, this is a most welcome return to “form,” as Rosenthal hasn’t been seen travelling down this road since his 1992 collaboration with Vidna Obmana under the moniker Terrace of Memories. That particular outing made much of sepulchral fog and post-industrial-blasted fug, but on this go-round, Rosenthal’s convinced space is the place. Well, the antecedents are obvious, from the 2001 iconography (Rosenthal states that the recording was inspired both by the titular film character and his infant son’s fascination with the film’s imagery, who also—quite precociously, I assume—accidentally captured the solar radiation flanges used for the digipak’s cover) to the work of numerous colleagues the artist champions on his label (Roach, the aforementioned Vidna). As a “literal” interpretation of the events that surely took place post-2001 and pre-2010, Pod is a determinedly stark and visceral aural portrait of a man caught in stasis, trapped in vacuum, lost in time forever. As isolationist music, the five tracks herein—loops composed of electronic dark matter and what must be the residual cries of distant quasars pulsating endlessly in the void—are every bit as searing as Lull or Lustmord’s horizon-bending epics. Of course, listening to this it’s easy to instantly call up a virtual font of folks who’ve built entire careers nestling comfortably on the well-worn upholstery adorning such thrones of drones (Oophoi, Mathias Grassow, Troum, denizens of labels such as Cyclic Law and Mystery Sea), reciting similarly elongated paeans to minimal sound discourse like some ancestral mantra. Despite this (or, perhaps, in spite of it), it’s difficult not to fully admire Rosenthal’s sterling contribution to the canon. Cursory listening allows the subtly shifting patina to narcotically massage the brain; deeper listening, wherein the music’s subliminal layers reveal themselves and methodically blossom, exact multitudes of pale sonic hues that drift, suspended, in the mid-range. The hues themselves trick the senses—does the ear detect respectfully rubbed samples of Jerry Goldsmith’s 2010 score occasionally irising out of the mix, or are they just ghostly, half-remembered echoes? Like the subject matter it refers to, Pod’s tactile, ethereal slipstream makes analogous the soundtrack for alien shamen guiding terrestrial souls from this mortal coil. -DARREN BERGSTEIN
Metal/Punk: Dark Ambient/Noise