Psst! Projekt label’s going live with it’s dark sound
by Achy Obejas for “After Hours”
Step aside, Ajax and Minty Fresh. Make some room.
This Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Chicago experiences “From Across this Gray Land,” the first festival celebrating artists on the Projekt label.
The what?
It seems that while our town has been aggressively slamming and bumping to a cavalcade of local label bands at Lounge Ax and the Double Door, Sam Rosenthal and his Projekt artists quietly stole into town and set up shop.
And quietly is the operative word here.
Projekt artists — including Rosenthal’s group, Black Tape for a Blue Girl — are deeply immersed in something that could only be called dark music: ambient, gothic and ethereal. It’s lush, dense and often gloomy. Unlike most trendy ambient music, Projekt’s ambient records feature vocals; there is virtually nothing to dance to; it swirls and envelopes with an unabashed romanticism. Compared with most of the noise in town, Projekt practically whispers.
Rosenthal, 30, started Projekt back in 1983 but it didn’t get moving until three years later, when he moved to California from his native Ft. Lauderdale. Feeling alienated and depressed, he recorded “The Rope,” which he describes as “a combo of techno pop and ambient, somewhere between Gary Neuman and Eno.”
“The Rope” was promptly strangled by the critics, although Rosenthal developed a small core of followers. “At the time, it really upset me,” he confesses. “Now I just kind of laugh. Now I realize a lot of pseudo-intellectual rock critics don’t want to deal with what they think is sappy romantic crap.”
So Rosenthal persevered: With Black Tape for a Blue Girl, he released “Mesmerized by the Sirens” in 1987, “Ashes in the Brittle Air” in 1989, “Chaos of Desire” in 1993, “This Lush Garden Within” in 1994; this year has produced “Remnants of a Deeper Purity.”
But is anyone buying this except Rosenthal and his mother?
Rosenthal laughs again. “We sell all around the world,” he explains. “We sell in Asia and Europe. We’re in Borders.”
Projekt’s best-selling band, Love Spirals Downward, sells about 10,000 CDs per release. Black Tape for a Blue Girl sells about 9,000. Located near Chinatown, Projekt is Rosenthal’s full-time job and obsession. The label employs eight people.
The Projekt Festival, the first of its kind for the label, will feature a buffet of bands, but Rosenthal’s honest about how scary it is for him.
“We’ve got fans coming from Hong Kong and England,” he says. “It just seemed like a good thing to do, to meet the people who like the music. But Black Tape has been a studio band for 10 years. It’s never been possible to play live — so we’ve never done it before.”
