Also this issue: Underdog Night DJ Cosmo Baker's hip-hop Remedy night turns 5. -Sean O’Neal Indie Blastoff -Ainé Ardron-Doley Beat Box -Ainé Ardron-Doley Very Emergency Facing illness and boredom, The Promise Ring changes its pace. -Chris Parker Billy Bob Thornton -A.D. Amorosi

May 23-29, 2002

music

Gathering the Magic

DARK OVERLORD: Sam Rosenthal is the key master.

Projektfest summons blue girls and boys to Philly.

by Helen H. Thompson

There’s a big indie music festival in town, but you can leave the thick-framed glasses and retro turtlenecks behind. Pick out something dark and subtle, or dark and garish, if you’re so inclined: This is Projektfest, a three-day showcase of talent on the independent darkwave label Projekt Records.

We've used the term darkwave a bit loosely here at the City Paper; in a sense, it was appropriated to encompass all dark and spooky genres when goth went trotting off to be the media scapegoat for All That Is Wrong With Kids Today. But once upon a time, darkwave was a subgenre of goth -- ethereal, swirly, esoteric. The genre's roots will be familiar to many 30- to 40-somethings: They lie amid the brooding shimmer of 4AD legends like Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil, as well as the lush texture of shoegazer pioneers like My Bloody Valentine.

At Projekt's helm is Sam Rosenthal, nerve center for the band black tape for a blue girl, arguably the center and driving force behind Projekt as a label. "Way back when I was a lad, I was writing a fanzine in Florida, and I thought for fun I would put out a cassette of some of the bands I was covering," says Rosenthal, who was a journalism major at the time and certainly didn't intend to make a career out of forging a new music genre and creating a label for it. "I sold, maybe, 28 copies of it. But over time, I did more cassettes, including my own music, and in 1986 I put out the first black tape album on vinyl."

By 1992, Rosenthal's work with Projekt and black tape had become a full-time job. The band is well-known for being at once lush and symphonic as well as minimalist and elegant, and their eighth release, the scavenger bride, is no exception. (As you may have figured out by now, Rosenthal eschews capital letters.)

Accompanied by his wife and partner, Lisa Feuer, on flute, Rosenthal employs a number of guest musicians for the album, which narrates the tale of a young bride-to-be poised on the brink of a Poe-esque decay. Scavenger is ruthlessly ambitious, and it is certainly resplendent. But newcomers to darkwave might want to approach it with caution; it seems to speak from the shadows of a preverbal past, the endless story of lost brides throughout time, framed in music that is likewise suspended in time.

Rosenthal, who at various times based the Projekt label in L.A., Chicago and, now, New York, picked Philadelphia for a couple of reasons. "We hadn't done a festival in five years, and when we started to plan it, turned out there was a gothic festival going on in New York already [Convergence, last September]. People come from around the country [for both festivals], so I thought it would be nice to choose a different city for them to go to.

"The last place black tape for a blue girl played [in Philly] was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we had a nice response from Philadelphia. It gave us a chance to work with people we had worked with in the past, including Chuck van Zyl of The Gathering and Patrick Rodgers of Dracula's Ball. It was an opportunity to work with local promoters to make a larger event and a better experience for the people who are coming."

The roster reads like a veritable who's who of darkwave and American gothic: the shoegazer dreampop of Mira; Lovespirals, the new incarnation of breakbeat ethereal darlings Love Spirals Downwards; legendary DJ Scary Lady Sarah from Chicago, who joins Patrick of NYC's Albion/Batcave at the turntables on Saturday; the elegiac grace of Audra, whose sound hearkens back to a simpler era of goth rock; and Voltaire, whose punk-folk circuitry is riddled with a wicked balance of wit, irony and satire, so effective that Cleveland DJ Spinmistress Batty (in town to spin for Dracula's Ball on Sunday) calls him "the gothic ŒWeird Al' Yankovic." Projektfest kicks off Friday with a meet-and-greet at the Hampton Inn, which will host a number of acoustic performances (and a merchants bazaar all weekend). Live musical events continue through Sunday at the Trocadero and St. Mary's Church.

Projektfest ’02 runs Fri.-Sun., May 24-26. For a complete schedule, including links for more information about bands, DJs and artists, visit www.projektfest.com.