Exploration and Ascent

Hi. I'm happy to finally be able to share the title 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. Like the mountaineers whose book was the original inspiration fo this, the album has explored plenty of dead ends before finding a way forward, and there are many track ideas that didn't make it. The ones that did, have felt worth pursuing, even if the path to the album has felt steep at times. 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. The track titles are always important for me, and recently I made a change to the track order which I'd been mentally struggling against for a while, partly at least because the tracks had always been planned to fall in one order, to tell a story (if only in my head) and rearranging them felt vaguely like falling short of the original concept. At the end of the day though albums always evolve during the process, and the final order just makes more sense in terms of musical flow. 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, 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 acoust [...]

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