Karsten Brustadt – Cape west

1 review for Karsten Brustadt – Cape west

1. 

   Glenn Folkvord – 1994-11-22

   This is Karsten Brustad‘s second album, though I don’t think it outshines his debut album, Intarsia. While Intarsia was beautiful in an enchanted forest way and a fresh gust of air, Cape West attempts to survive on beautiful chord combinations. The album smells of too many preset sounds, and synth strings and electronic voices. In the long run it gets too tiresome with all these clean, pretty, smooth, soft sounds.

   Open is an example tracks with insignificant electronic sounds.
   Then there is Danza, which is supposed to sound all acoustic, with avantguarde synth strings, piano and cembalo. Karsten, a suggestion: Please don’t use electronic strings and sequencer to make classical music. It’s examples like this that make me understand why professors at the conservatoire complain about cheap plastic music.
   Those were the bad parts. There are many good sides to Cape West as well.
   First Light is an exciting song both in terms of form and melody, while Birds has some incredibly beautiful bird’s singing sampled into it. Sound filtering is always cool and you find some good examples of that (in combination with stereo panning) in the intro of the title track.
   Too bad these techniques (along with a bit of phasing) was not used more on the album.
   Trust is another track and is easily one of my favorites from this album. It’s a small masterpiece and has a feeling of grandness and richness.

   Cape West is an album it’s hard to make up one’s mind about. Some is good, and some is boring. You’ll have to make up your own mind about this album.

   1994. Glenn Folkvord