Hi. I’m happy to finally be able to share the title at least of what is hopefully the new Northcape album… It’s called ‘Exploration and Ascent’ which in a way I think is a nice summing-up of the process of creating it. The album has explored plenty of dead ends before finding a way forward, and there are many ideas that didn’t make it. The ones that did, have felt worth pursuing, even if the path to the album has felt a bit steep at times (I’ll finish that ‘mountaineering’ metaphor now…). I’ve tried to create some kind of unity in the sound while also keeping enough variety from track to track, and this is always a challenge – at the end of the day I don’t think it’s a good idea to try too hard to control where a new track idea is going, so I’ve aimed for as good a compromise as possible. I definitely think the sound of this album shows a clear evolution from the last two Northcape releases.

It’s probably obvious by now (!) that I find that finalizing an album and ‘letting go’ is the hardest part of the whole process. This explains why it feels like I announced there was a new album on the way ages ago, and not much has seemed to happen since – in reality I’ve been struggling with perfectionism, and probably wasting quite a bit of time as well. I want the album to be as good as it can be, but it’s also true that the same track can sound different on different days, so I’m unlikely to ever be completely happy with everything. Bass has been a particular concern, my ‘studio’ at home is never going to be brilliant for acoustics, so as well as getting some acoustic treatment (difficult in a rented flat), I’ve been listening to the album in as many different places as possible. This adds to the complexity of course, as does trying to make it sound acceptable in mono without losing the benefits of stereo (I’m only partially successful at this- stereo is after all much more important and listening to music in mono really isn’t a great idea). Eventually I’ve reached a point where spending more time tweaking mixes REALLY isn’t productive. It is, after all, not yet mastered. Letting go of an album is always scary, which is another reason it’s tempting to drag out the process- once it’s gone, I always suddenly spot things that are wrong that somehow I didn’t hear through multiple listens!

But overall I’m quite happy with the album at this point. I think it has what I really like to aim for with all of my albums, a strong unifying idea behind the tracks. I plan to write more about the inspiration behind it and the tracklisting later but the next step is for the label to hear it…

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