Sam Rosenthal - Before the Buildings Fell (2000)

Before the Buildings Fell was recorded at various points of depression, as a catharsis. While the songs with lyrics became The Rope ( Black Tape for a Blue Girl ), these arpeggiator - driven songs were put aside. Upon reexamination, the emotions were still valid. The songs returned. Kathryn is for Ms. Pilkenton; Jane for Ms. Berube; and The Amber Girl was written so that I might forget Robin, but no such Luck.

This was recorded in my California dorm room on a 4 - track cassete porta - studio using a Korg Poly - 61 ( with Arpeggiator but no Midi ) and a Boss DSD - 2 foot pedal delay.

Sam

Black Tape for a Blue Girl's founder Sam Rosenthal had his musical beginnings in electronic music before there were genre names like "electronica." Back in 1986 (without sequencers, samplers, or MIDI for stringing together computers and keyboards) Rosenthal was experimenting with the creation of instrumental music synchronously warm and ominous. Playing with the shape of sounds in a totally "hands-on" manner, Rosenthal pioneered a style close to the post-prog work of Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. From this point he evolved to Dark Wave - Gothic soudscapes. P. Ewing

1 - kathryn
2 - diversion
3 - resolution
4 - the room
5 - jane
6 - leading to the edge
7 - before the buildings fell
8 - fragments of benediction
9 - the amber girl (Includes a bonus fifteen minute CD-ROM track of Sam's video art, for the track Fragments of Benediction)

Sam Rosenthal - Electronics

with

Lara Radford - Violin / Industry 8 & voice 6, 8

Cauleen Smith - Cello 4

Anne Sunstrom - Sax / Industry 1, 6

Cover Model: Kathy Rohrbach, from video by Sam

Recorded in 1986 on a 4-track cassette porta-studio.
Released in 2000 by Projekt.

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Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin' Lovers (1956)

"Here is an album that means to deny the rock & roll that was then changing America and succeeds. The songs were standards, most ten or twenty years old, and Sinatra and arranger Nelson Riddle were bent on jazzy, hip sophistication. 'I've Got You Under My Skin' still stands as a Sinatra high point." Rolling Stone

"You could forget that the guy ever had a good day. After Billie Holiday, nobody in American music has ever done more to slake our taste for romantic masochism than Frank Sinatra.

[F]or me, the album's masterpiece is 'I Thought About You.' A little-known song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, it's the sort of standard you might expect from Edward Hopper had he been a songwriter instead of a painter. The singer, separated from the woman he loves, is on a night train, peeking out the shade at the moonlit little towns that slide by his window. Each sight, recounted in language as spare as a line drawing, nonetheless takes on the richness of a painted canvas. It's the ordinary transformed into a nighttime dreamscape, lighting a low steady flame in the singer who longs to belong somewhere -- in the arms of the woman he is leaving behind, or in one of the houses whose lit windows he can see from the train." Charles Taylor, Salon.com

1. You Make Me Feel So Young

2. It Happened In Monterey

3. You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me

4. You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me

5. Too Marvelous For Words

6. Old Devil Moon

7. Pennies From Heaven

8. Love Is Here To Stay

9. I've Got You Under My Skin

10. I Thought About You

11. We'll Be Together Again

12. Makin' Whoopee

13. Swingin' Down The Lane

14. Anything Goes

15. How About You?

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