Product Description
2 Flare Equilibrium USHK92636702
3 The Visitor USHK92636703
4 Solar Silent Sound USHK92636704
5 Filament ← not enough happens USHK92636705
6 Angular Momentum, Vaulted Sky USHK92636706
7 The Width of Shadows USHK92636707
8 Orbital Equilibrium USHK92636708
Genres: Electronic, Drone, Ambient
Abstract whirlpools of multi-layered emotions move like shadows, flickering across the sonic darkness of time.
The Width of Shadows is Projekt and Black Tape For A Blue Girl founder Sam Rosenthal’s first new album of solo electronic-ambient-drone music since 2015’s As Lonely As Dave Bowman: Monolith. Originally conceived as a collection of orphaned tracks, it evolved into a cohesive album painting a minimalist atmosphere of dark corners, hidden solitude, rippling cosmic waves of shadows, and time-altered transmissions of barren feelings.
Starting with the anchor of two previously released tracks (the opener “Sunflow” from 2024 and the album’s penultimate track “The Width of Shadows” from 2002), Rosenthal went digging through the hamper of unrealized tracks from the last five years, dusting off once-started and then-forgotten ideas, radically reprocessing them to create the bulk of the 49-minute album.
Rosenthal reflects, “Ambient music is a lot more like Abstract Expressionism than the Romantic Realism of my work in Black Tape For A Blue Girl. For a while now I’ve been pretty down on making music because I annoy myself with my exacting need for perfection in the vocal music. After doing a few of the Nova Cat Purring Sounds albums, I decided to try a similar approach to ambient drone music: work quickly! Don’t get bogged down by obsession. I searched the hard drive for tracks that were orphaned, gave them a fresh look, removed bits I didn’t like, drastically rearranged and reprocessed them, and added new synth textures and processing. I didn’t restrict myself with loyalty to the piece’s initial ideas. These tracks are quite far from where I started; I used the music on the hard drive as raw material for composition. One of the things I like these days is that I don’t document what notes or chords or sounds I’m playing. I lay my parts onto the computer multi-track, edit, blur, reverb… then delete whatever needs to go until it has its own undertone and feeling. In this way, it combines the two ideas of AbEx: the spontaneity and gestural brushwork of Action, and the contemplative yet emotional drone of Color Field. I like how that’s worked out here.”
In a vast dimension of expansive, mysterious resonances, The Width of Shadows is an evocative experience of longing and spacious reflection.
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
There is a peculiar elegance in making something new from material you had already given up on. The Width of Shadows, Sam Rosenthal’s first solo electronic-ambient-drone album in more than a decade, is essentially an exercise in musical salvage: unfinished pieces gathered from the last five years, dismantled, rearranged, processed and allowed to become something other than what they originally intended to be.
Rosenthal is, of course, a central figure in American darkwave and ambient music, founder of Projekt Records and Black Tape For A Blue Girl. Yet this record feels deliberately removed from the narrative density of his vocal work. There are no songs demanding attention, no obvious destination, barely even a conventional sense of progression. Instead, The Width of Shadows operates through layers, resonance and gradual changes in emotional temperature.
The short “Sunflow” establishes the atmosphere almost immediately, a fragile electronic shimmer that feels less like an opening statement than the first patch of light entering an otherwise unlit room. “Flare Equilibrium” and “The Visitor” expand that space, introducing slowly shifting tones and submerged harmonic activity. The music is spacious without being empty: there is always something moving somewhere inside it, although it often seems to be moving at the geological speed favoured by ambient musicians and continental drift.
What makes the album particularly interesting is Rosenthal’s decision to abandon his former perfectionism. Rather than reconstructing each piece according to its original blueprint, he treats the old recordings as raw material. Sounds are removed, blurred, reprocessed and displaced until the tracks acquire their own internal atmosphere. This gives the music a slightly unstable quality, as though the compositions are remembering what they once were but have decided not to tell us.
“Solar Silent Sound” and “Filament” are especially effective in this respect. Their textures seem to hover between electronic warmth and something colder, almost astronomical, while “Angular Momentum, Vaulted Sky” introduces a stronger sense of gravitational movement. The title itself is revealing: Rosenthal’s music rarely depicts darkness as absence. Darkness has weight here. It bends the surrounding space.
The older The Width of Shadows, originally dating from 2002, becomes the album’s emotional hinge. Heard in this context, it no longer feels like an archival inclusion but part of a larger conversation between different moments in Rosenthal’s musical life. The past is not being restored so much as made to coexist with the present.
And then comes “Orbital Equilibrium”, seventeen minutes that provide the album’s real test of patience. It is also its reward. Rather than relying on dramatic development, the piece gradually alters the listener’s perception of scale. Sounds become less like individual events and more like a surrounding environment. The distinction between foreground and background begins to collapse.
There is an appealing contradiction at the centre of “The Width of Shadows”. Rosenthal approached these abandoned tracks with greater spontaneity, yet the resulting album feels unusually controlled. Its freedom comes not from chaos but from relinquishing the obligation to preserve an original idea. Once the music is treated as material rather than property, it becomes possible to reshape it without nostalgia.
The result is ambient music with a surprisingly human imperfection. It does not attempt to manufacture transcendence through endless clouds of synthetic sweetness. Its beauty is darker, more provisional, occasionally even slightly bruised. These are sounds that seem to have survived something.
Perhaps that is why The Width of Shadows feels less like a collection of finished compositions than a landscape assembled from traces: fragments of abandoned ideas, old recordings, new processing and memories that have lost their timestamps.
The shadows are wide because the past keeps taking up space. Rosenthal simply learned how to illuminate them without making them disappear. -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
Amorphous shapes and formless structures abound in this collection of minimalist pieces by Projekt label and Black Tape for a Blue Girl founder Sam Rosenthal. The album’s eight compositions were mostly ideas that work was started on, later forgotten, and even later brought back into the foreground as the basis for something new, very different than its original intent. Every piece seems to be built from a base of raw elementary electronics, very slow moving, slow changing drifts from heaven, perhaps one droning chord with very subtle nuances in each of its components, shimmering and swirling around the listener in a stirring array of sound. The brief opener “Sunflow” conceals a melody stretched out into an interminable, beautiful endlessness, though before one will recognize it for what it is, it’s already gone, moving into the dreamy “Flare Equilibrium,” a piece that evolves slowly and builds over its seven minute duration with intent, deep caverns of sounds unexplored mixing freely with the stirring slow-moving molten chaos at the surface; one can attempt to stop and listen to what’s going past in the soundcurrent, or just close your eyes and flow with it.
The deep cavernous sounds of “Filament” might at times seem like they are spinning, or even about to break down the walls around you, but ultimately harmless, as they eventually break and slowly fade away. The title track begins with some field recordings mixed with some powerful overlapping droning waves, bright but subtly colored and all seeming to mixing together effortlessly. It seems like everything is leading up to something, that something being the massive seventeen minute closer “Orbital Equilibrium,” an ongoing vaporous patchwork of slow-moving drones that obscure one another as they proceed, something truly beautiful and unique among all others, a moving soundscape that slowly begins to fade from the midpoint, evaporating slowly. The Width of Shadows is surely something that fans of ambient sounds will want to immerse themselves in. -Peter Thelen