For forty years, Sam Rosenthal has been the man behind other people's introspection. He founded Projekt Records, the Portland label that became America's home for ambient, ethereal, and darkwave music, the house of Steve Roach and Lycia and lovesliescrushing, and he's led Black Tape For A Blue Girl since 1986. When a person spends four decades midwifing the quietest music in the country, you start to wonder what they keep for themselves. The Width of Shadows is the answer: his first solo ambient-drone album in over a decade, built almost entirely from his own orphans.
I love how this record came to exist. It started as a sweep of the cutting-room floor: two anchor tracks, the opener "Sunflow" from 2024 and the title piece dating all the way back to 2002, and around them Rosenthal went digging through five years of once-started, then-forgotten ideas, reprocessing them so radically that he describes using his own hard drive as raw material rather than a demo bin. He works blind on purpose, laying parts down without documenting a single note or chord, then editing, blurring, drowning things in reverb, and deleting until only an undertone remains. His comparison is to painting, splitting ambient music between action and color field, the gestural and the contemplative, and calling this record the place both meet. A twenty-four-year-old track and a two-year-old track holding hands across an album of erased middles: the thing is literally made of time.
The result is forty-nine minutes of dark-cornered minimalism, eight tracks that move like light across a wall, ending in the seventeen-minute "Orbital Equilibrium," which is where the record stops being a collection and becomes a room you've been sitting in. His last solo outing, back in 2015, was recorded under the alias As Lonely As Dave Bowman, an album that drifted its astronaut namesake all the way to the monolith at Jupiter. This one stays home. Dark corners, hidden solitude, transmissions of feeling altered by the time they took to arrive. The space is interior now, and it suits him.
There's a video for "Flare Equilibrium" that catches the register:
And here's the detail that tells you who Rosenthal is after forty years in this business: the album is name-your-price. A label founder who has spent his whole life figuring out how to keep quiet music economically alive just set his own record's price at whatever you think it's worth. It's on Bandcamp in lossless, through the Projekt store, and streaming everywhere via his artist pages, and while you're in the neighborhood, the Projekt catalog is forty years deep and full of rooms like this one.
