To many ears, Northcape’s music will probably fall within a range of genres suitable to draw an easy category from. Yet, it has the rock-solid foundation that is not that uncommon in independent one-man projects such as this: a foundation made of non-constraint. One can feel there is no overarching guideline to the music in the sense of having a checklist of what must be done in order to comply with the ‘standards’ of IDM, or ambient, or whatever. It is what it is, and while that’s a very good thing, in Alastair Brown’s case it’s not free of drawbacks.
 
Captured From Static follows a theme which will be very familiar to ambient fans: that of memory and space. It intends to spark up the listener’s imaginations through the artist’s very real connections to certain places and the emotions they’re attached to in the form of a voyage. Every track title is related to a place, most of the time implicitly by conjuring up, in an impressionistic way, a mood and a temperament, as well as a vague feeling of not being quite there (such as “Doesn’t Feel Like A Long Way” and "Approaching the Trig Point”). Captured from stillness as much as from the noisily indeterminate screen of memory, the music flows with trip-hop beats and lounge-like melodies that become blurred in open ambient electronics. The result is pleasant and endlessly listenable, but not exactly engaging and demanding of the listener’s attention. It’s like a soundtrack version of a Boards of Canada album, rich in detail, smooth in flow, but eerily absent; perhaps Brown succeeded too well in his purpose of creating an emotional journey through space-time, leading us into territory so personal it’s hard to turn it into our own. It’s also very probable that it’s just me, living far removed from the English context the music was created in, unable to connect with places that for now I can only imagine.
 
In any case, as a dash of memories the music occasionally also approaches the fragmentation of IDM, but in a very illusory way that steers clear from fully assuming the consequences. This is to say, the tracks are composed as wholes, and they stay that way even when a beat is broken into odd patterns, always coming out unified at the end, just the way they started. It’s the same with the ambient sections, opening up to apparently free forms that never really go out of the artist’s control and into the imaginations of the listeners. Therefore, at all times we’re listening to Brown’s movements at play, a definite ‘mark’ of the solo musician that wouldn’t matter that much if those more experimental elements weren’t involved. It’s very clear in the moments  where the melodies take the lead that they were always planned, since they’re great, pretty, and fun. It goes to show that when he’s in total control, Brown can write some awesome music while he really struggles when trying to delegate some of that control.
 
Electronic fans waiting for the next Boards of Canada album as well as a worthy Massive Attack release will probably enjoy Northcape’s offering in the meantime. Considering there’s plenty of his material available for free in various services around the internet, his work can keep one occupied for a long time.
-David Murietta