Black Tape for a Blue Girl
As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire (Projekt)
by Jamie Kiffel
The pope stands just behind the door to his terrace. Crowds gather in the square below, arguing, shoving, selling souvenirs, waiting to be blessed. The pope listens, shivering behind the barely-open terrace doors, hearing at once the mob outside and cello-pure, somber prayers echoing from the nave outside his stone tower room. The pope’s eyes glisten as he chokes back an asthmatic cough. He sweats, wipes spittle from the corner of his mouth, and opens his jaw to speak, his hand on his cross, eyes raised. He chokes.
The sound of a pope’s guilty conscience, the sound of a thousand-year-dead choir boy’s “Ave Maria” worn into the stone walls of a cathedral, the impression of colored light staining a rainbow in blots across a dead king’s private chapel, and the tone of a breath upon gasping up into a still church bell are some of the many aural impressions captured on As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire, the latest release from Black Tape for a Blue Girl.
Ashen-faced lovers who equate death with the soul-sapping pain of passion fill this minimalist recording while maintaining meaning for both the crushed velvet Goth and the saffron-robed yogina. The majority of the pieces play like musical philosophy texts, filled with stunning observations of still, quiet moments, as viewed by low clarinets, open-throated flutes, and spectral, waltzing oboes. I regret the addition of lyrics such as “sometimes it’s worse to feel alive than to feel dead” (in “Denouement”), which jar the otherwise perfect soundtrack to a shadow, a pang of guilt, or a candle drip. Generally, the vocals, although utilized as another undefined element among instruments and not as a binding force, distract from what is otherwise a stunning series of subtle sound impressions.
A biblical city awakens to sand shifting with chromatically rising strings; tides and bass tones evoke a hermit’s rock ledge; a synthesizer paces breath-steps, and strings open, shimmering wide, low water strokes. This is the sound of a poet’s mind bleeding ink. Press your ear to the paper and hear the erupting soul.
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