Bleep

The open sea may be a well-worn muse in literature, Café Kaput aka Cate Brooks of The Advisory Circle avoids its obvious siren calls on her latest album as Café Kaput by focusing on what makes the act of sailing alluring in the first place.

Brooks was drawn to nautical language while making Maritime: Themes & Textures, but therein lies a fascinating, almost ironic dilemma considering the project’s instrumental nature. The answer is in the second half of Maritime’s title, using nautical flags and the talk of transient sailors as textural themes to capture the romantic idea of setting sail as a longing observer on land.

If anything, Maritime appears to be just as swayed by the cinematic potential of new age music. Most of the album’s soundscapes could’ve easily found their place in a Jacques Cousteau documentary as he discovers worlds on the ocean floor, but Brooks doesn’t stay rigid within its retro aesthetics. ‘Waves and Knots’ burbles to life as if it’s floating up from the bottom of the ocean, anchoring itself with a piano melody that opens the album with the kind of wistfulness most would save for the end of an adventure. Maritime thankfully maintains its emotive introduction, channelling the transitory mystique of shipping vessels on ‘Tugboat’ before rendering the easy-listening sounds of a yacht party down to a syrupy slow meditation on ‘Inshore Waters’.

These are more than concrete experiences, Brooks aimed to capture the “very ephemeral and non-verbal” experience of being on the water, which is where Café Kaput’s soundscapes shine brightest. ‘A Surface Like Glass’ is a solemn ode to water until a playful bit of marimba interrupts, while the album-closing ‘Maritime’ distils the album’s emotional core into a piece of synthesised psychedelia that radiates both childlike eagerness and contemplative ruminating of an isolated life on the water.