Captured From Static is the new album from the UK based electronic musician Northcape and is his first release on the American label Sun Sea Sky Productions. Sun Sea Sky’s website states that this album is of the kind that comes along every once-in-a-while, one which both defines a genre and sets the standard for others to follow. A pretty bold claim indeed and one that creates a good deal of expectation in this listener.

There is a beautiful honesty and a subtle sophistication about Northcape’s music that is refreshing and engaging. From the opening bars of the opening track ‘Doesn’t Feel Like a Long Way’ a sense of gentle and slowly building suspense develops as beautifully tailored synth sounds lift you up and carry you off. A crisp snare kicks in and you are transported. This is music deftly and cleverly executed with a clear understanding of the emotional power of light and shade, of melody and rhythmic nuances.

And so it continues on, track after track, because this is an album where each and every track is a gem. Northcape is a musical conjurer, or perhaps a better description would be a musical ticket office, because there is definitely a sense of distance covered, of travels embarked upon. Clear melodic lines are a key feature of this music, some catchy, some beautifully haunting. It is with these strands, interwoven with intelligent and perceptive beats that Northcape creates his magic carpet on which you are carried aloft to distant lands.

A definite sense of yearning and of separation characterizes much of this album. This is especially the case in the superb ‘Approaching The Trig Point’, a track whose melodic synth line is like rain drops streaking down a window pane. However, just as you are lulled by the sweet and melancholic sound into wistful reverie a smudged and dirtied synth sets up a counter point whose scale and depth conjures up a sense of remoteness that can only intensify the emotive qualities of the piece.

A clever use of location recorded samples give the track Shinkansen to Kyoto a filmic quality that serves to further underline the almost travelogue quality this album has. A feeling underlined on the track Clear Moment, with its reverb laden arpeggios, their gentle echoed tails sitting just behind fidgety, carefully modulated drums, where you pause a while to absorb the journey thus far.

Throughout the album Northcape employs unexpected sounds, like the creaking of wood or the tinkling of what sounds like shell wind chimes on the track Moitessier. This piece, with its almost gamboling but gentle initial pace, is a strange combination of journey and destination and, although it retreats gently off into the distance as it ends, Northcape manages to create in the listener a sense of unease - of business yet to be completed. For a moment we are allowed to dwell on these thoughts of loss or regret before, with aplomb, as if ushering us on to the next leg of our voyage, Northcape picks up the pace with the delightful First Day in A New Town. Again the build up is gradual as layers of instruments are added. There is even a hint of harmonica infused sound in there as the melodies and the beats build slowly up towards a melody so sweet and lilting it would move even the most seasoned of traveler. When Northcape reaches for a crescendo he does it fully aware of what his music must do, never overstating it or lapsing into the sentimental.

Northcape has created his own musical world, with carefully set and delineated rules. There is a discipline to what he does, whether it be in the sounds he chooses to sculpt or the moments he chooses to bring the levels right down to enhance the subtle dramatic quality of what he is trying to achieve. Inside this framework he is ever inventive, using his musical discipline as a foil against which his considerable imagination can play.

This is an album of considerable beauty, an album that enchants and invites the listener to visit spaces of memory and imagination. Northcape has indeed succeeded in producing one of those albums that comes along every once-in-a-while, one which both defines a genre and sets the standard for others to follow. Melodic electronica has a new hero.