In July of 2024 Ben Holton started writing songs touched by the experience of visiting his ailing father. Visiting every other day, Holton recorded these sketches on a phone as he went. With his father’s passing a few months later the songs were set aside until, in June 2025, they were dusted off and recorded in Holton’s childhood home.
Such a process has the potential for being painfully introspective, wearisomely maudlin and/or darkly cathartic and in other hands might have ended up as such, but instead Holton seems to have distilled the essence of previous recordings (under the Birds In The Brickwork, My Autumn Empire and The Balloonist identities, as well as part of epic45) into delicate ruminations of solo guitar. In this context in particular the songs benefit from being wordless, instead relying on the reverberation of sound to suggest the tendrils of love, loss and memory that inevitably accompany such experiences. The album then sounds not so much as a laying to rest of ghosts as a summoning; the music communing with memory to create something suffused with the dusk of nostalgia. That can be a tricky beast to flirt with of course, for nostalgia is renowned for tempting us with its sweetest smile before slipping the cold blade of regret into our heart, all the while whispering promises of eternal delight. Holton wisely avoids this embrace and instead creates music that inhabits the liminal space between past, present and future without any hint of cloying sentimentality.
‘Flowers Made Of Light’ is not entirely an album of solo guitar suburban folk music, however, for Holton is joined in places by local Midlands’ musician Jim Sutton. A former member of the group Maurice And The Minors, whose 1987 album ‘Run By The Moon’ was a favourite of Holton’s father, Sutton here lends fretless bass in support of the guitar. The subdued assurance of Sutton’s contributions help imbue the songs with a welcome degree of warmth and lend a delightful element of local continuity to proceedings.
Of the songs themselves, the gorgeous ‘Station Road’ has echoes of Aztec Camera’s ‘Knife’ tingling in the moonlight whilst Vini Reilly dances with Virginia Astley in the shadows. ‘Late July’ finds characters from a John Moore novel idling away an afternoon listening to ‘North Marine Drive’ whilst ‘Mornings’ is Armada paperbacks gathering dust in Instamatic photographs. In ‘Your Guitar’, meanwhile, we can see Will Ackerman reading Lettice Cooper in dawn’s early light as a late dahlia drops petals from a finger vase on the windowsill like a fragment from an Oded Shimshon set piece. The Ackerman reference resonates particularly strongly, and Holton has pointed to the influence of the Windham Hill artists seeping through his work. Indeed, the sleeve of ‘Flowers Made Of Light’ is a fine homage to Ackerman’s 1983 title ‘Past Light’. Again, that play of time’s passing allowing the past and the future to kiss the present and make it sparkle.
‘Flowers Made Of Light’ then may be a deeply personal record, but in making it Ben Holton has also made something of universal appeal and lasting value. These songs remind us that out of loss comes faith and hope, whilst in the shadows of death we can, if we are fortunate, find delicate, delicious light and solace.
For many years David Ackles was a name I would occasionally hear whispered reverently by music aficionados but whose actual music I never seemed to come across. Others from broadly the same time period and singer-songwriter oeuvre such as David Blue, Fred Neil, Tom Rush and the two Tims (Hardin and Buckley) would crop up fairly regularly on compilation tapes sent by friends, but never any Ackles. Why not? It’s a question that author and musician Mark Brend seeks in part to answer in his newly published book ‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles’ whilst simultaneously providing an in-depth exploration of Ackles’ life and recording career.
A devout fan since stumbling on a copy of Ackles’ 1968 debut ‘Down River’ LP in a second hand record shop whilst in his twenties back in 1985, Brend has previously championed the obscure American singer-songwriter in magazine articles. With this book he has built significantly on those foundations to deliver something that, whilst certainly standing strongly within the myriad ranks of other music biographies, nevertheless also steps sideways outside the pack. There is an inevitability about this, for just as Ackles’ records struggled to be neatly slotted into one easily marketable genre, so his story refuses to conform to the expected Rock norms. There are no great conflicts to explore here, no real grapplings with demons nor scandalous liaisons. No mental health trauma or addiction issues overcome. Instead there is decency, respectability, quiet faith and hard work, related in a sympathetic voice.
Each of Ackles’ four albums released between 1968 and 1973 is dealt with in detail and Brend outlines the writing processes, recording sessions and the individual songs with a well balanced blend of technical objectivity and subjective opinion. The book is well researched and includes detailed notes and appendices with transcripts/descriptions of various unreleased tapes which will, no doubt, please the most dedicated of fans. It is interesting that measured objectivity is to the fore in Brend’s writing, for it perhaps partially explains why Ackles’ music remains as relatively obscure as it does. He is very much a musician’s musician, after all. A writer’s writer. It is telling, I think, that in spite of the likes of Phil Collins, Elton John, Bernie Taupin (who produced what is arguably Ackles’ masterpiece, 1972’s ‘American Gothic’ LP) and Elvis Costello vocally lauding Ackles’ work, their support seems to have had negligible impact. It seems like those who knew already knew, and most of them were musicians and songwriters themselves anyway.
Will this book then raise the profile of David Ackles where the support of Pop/Rock stars failed? I certainly hope so, for the records most assuredly deserve a wider audience. Sadly, however, I suspect that it will not. This is not the fault of Ackles’ story nor of Mark Brend’s telling of it, but a rather a reflection of what is valued in our current cultural climate (and arguably has been since the onset of the age of Pop Culture). There is little that panders to the lowest common denominator in Ackles’ songs and instead there is a quiet belief in the intelligence of his audience. The songs are literary. Theatrical. Full of inventive narrative, character and situational studies as opposed to the ‘confessional’. The songs might be sung in the first person, but they are not about the singer. As with his life, the message seems to be that there are more valuable and important things than the individual and it is hard to think of anything more out of kilter with the prevailing winds, then or now.
Hard to think too of any greater reason for investigating both Ackles’ work and Brend’s book.
In the film ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ there is a scene where two old high school friends meet for the first time in ten years. The dialogue is simply one character repeating the phrase ‘ten years’ in a variety of different inflections as if in disbelief. The disbelief is of course a mixture of surprise at seeing his friend again and at the realisation of time’s passing. It goes like that, doesn’t it? We blink and suddenly time has escaped from us. Where did it go? Heaven only knows.
If you are familiar with ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ you will appreciate that it is the greatest high-school reunion/hired killer movie ever made, with a fabulous line for every occasion. I’m looking forward to trying some of them out next week at my own 40-year high school reunion, particularly the one about everyone still being the same only having swelled. This may be harsh, yet a glance in the mirror assures me it is nevertheless true. Naturally we will temper the realisation that we have all ‘swelled’ by saying to each other “oh, you haven’t changed a bit”, yet as time passes, the first (unspoken but implied) part of the line by Joan Cusack’s character seems to become less and less accurate. These exchanges seem to me to be charming and interesting because perhaps they capture the idea that we see people from our pasts as if we are all still in that distant moment, time doing strange slips and slithers around our perception and manipulating memory. And even as we tell ourselves that we recognise ourselves and others held in fragments of amber we simultaneously feel bewildered by it all. Threads may straggle through the fractures in time, but they often seem barely attached to our present selves. Gossamer thin, they waft in the breath of a half-remembered embrace, an illusory once-wished-for kiss. Where did it go? Heaven only knows.
It is now forty-two years since the release of Tracey Thorn’s ‘A Distant Shore’ LP but it remains the record that, more than any other perhaps, contains the essence of my own 1983 into 1984 experiences. I wrote about it just twelve years later for my e-zine ‘Tangents’ and re-visiting that piece now I feel the same kind of curious feeling described above. Everything oscillates between recognition and ignorance, a peculiar fluctuation between embarrassment and pride. Interestingly, Tracey Thorn writes something similar about her own feelings on revisiting the record for this expanded Cherry Red reissue, noting in her sleeve notes that: “I’m not sure if I’m still that same girl, or if I totally remember what it felt like to be her, but she slightly breaks my heart, and I’m proud of her.”
It would be overstating the truth to suggest that Thorn’s sleeve notes may be the most appealing thing about this reissue, but not by much, for they really are extraordinary. Carefully avoiding the trap that so many artists seem to fall into of disowning their earlier, less mature works, Thorn instead holds her nerve and admits to the success of these songs and recordings. “There is passion here” she writes, “and a kind of romanticism, which is tempered by an awareness of the riskiness of being romantic. I can hear a complicated mix of self-revelation and self-preservation. And what an extraordinary kind of unearned confidence it takes to write a lyric like “I’m old enough now to know there’s no such thing” at the age of 19.” There is something about this last observation that, I think, cuts to the heart of what makes the songs on ‘A Distant Shore’ just so remarkably, elegantly classic Pop mementoes. They capture, I think, that sense of peculiar self-assuredness (hovering in an awkward manner so perilously close to arrogance that it can be misconstrued by those who fail to spot an inherent vulnerability) of artists in their late-teenage years. Something of the sense of rejecting the ‘wisdom’ of one’s elders whilst having cherry-picked just enough knowledge to assume an air of fragile adulthood; simultaneously seeing and being ignorant of the complexities in situations and being blessed with the ability to cut through everything and to express simple truths in the bold, bare, romantic language of youth.
Thorn then is rightly proud of the record her 19-year-old self made for the grand sum of £138, and the songs continue to reverberate with the brittle romantic confidence (the “steely toughness” as Thorn herself describes it) that made them so appealing forty years ago. Are they of their time? From an objective perspective I suspect they are, for there is something in the connections out to the likes of contemporary music by the likes of Young Marble Giants, Vic Godard and Durutti Column (all of whose records Thorn admits to having in her bedsit collection at the time) that root the recordings to 1982, if such historical contextualisation is your bag. Objectively too I suspect there is a strong case for adding that as well as being of their time they are also timeless, (not so) simply because they do such a remarkable job of capturing the nature of being that particular, peculiar age, regardless of any arbitrary dot dropped on the linear narrative of time.
The bonus materials on the CD reissue are every bit as good. ‘Lucky Day’, recorded at the same time as the rest of the album did not make it onto the original release but would certainly have made a terrific flip-side to the ‘Plain Sailing’ single in place of the (admittedly great) cover of Monochrome Set’s ‘Goodbye Joe’ (which does not feature as an extra on this reissue, incidentally). The remaining four songs, meanwhile, will be familiar to any fan of Everything But The Girl for they all appeared on the group’s debut ‘Eden’ set in 1984. These unadorned versions, recorded at some point after the release of ‘A Distant Shore’ are still (delightfully) very much in the vein of that album, whilst hindsight and familiarity with the more polished ‘Eden’ recordings lends them too a sense of being bridging elements through a period of remarkable artistic development.
Forty years, then. Forty YEARS. FORTY years. FORTY YEARS. Where did it go? Heaven only knows. For Tracey Thorn of course we know that it went to a string of remarkable records both by herself and with Ben Watt in Everything But The Girl. It went into eloquent books full of astute observations and poignant reflections, plus a lot more besides. For the rest of us? Maybe something less visibly memorable, but no-less valuable in our ways. And whilst there are surely more pleasures in store for all of us (some of them, one hopes, in the form of more work from Tracey Thorn) it can occasionally be worthwhile opening those portals into the past and enjoying the surreal envelopment of memory. There are certainly few finer portals than ‘A Distant Shore’.
I took part recently in the Facebook meme about albums that influenced my taste in music. The ‘rules’ suggested posting only a photo of the sleeve, with no explanations etc, but frankly where is the fun in that? I want to know why people pick particular things and the thinking that’s gone into it. So here are my twenty. Dates are year of original release, and not necessarily when they influenced my taste.
1 – Abba ‘Greatest Hits’ (1976)
No, I was not listening to Punk in 1976, and it was not until 1977 when my friend Graeme Milligan bunked off school to buy a copy of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ that I had even a vague notion about what it was. No, instead I was, like most of my peers, in thrall to ABBA and thank goodness for that. I have foolishly denied my love of ABBA at various points in the intervening years, which tells you nothing about the music and everything about my insecurities and the need to be seen to be following the correct trends appropriate to whatever might be deemed ‘cool’ in whatever circles I might have imagined myself to belong. My first pick for this entry was actually 1977’s ‘The Album’ which in hindsight may been even more counter-cool cool, and I do remember excitedly queuing up to see ‘The Movie’ at the Orient cinema in Ayr. In truth though it would be this ‘Greatest Hits’ collection that I would have listened to most; the one with Agnetha and Bjorn looking a bit sulky on one side of the gatefold and Frida and Benny snogging on the other. In hindsight it’s a truly great photograph, the two ends of the bench and two sides of the gatefold capturing the gamut of emotional treasure contained within the songs. Of course I was unaware of this at the time. I just thought it was perfect Pop music. And it was. And it is.
2 – The Jam ‘All Mod Cons’ (1978)
It strikes me that the majority of the albums/records that influence one’s musical taste by default come from a time when one is most easily influenced. Which is to say, largely, though not exclusively, when one is young and impressionable. In all truth the records that had the most influence on my own developing taste in my youth were singles, mostly heard on the radio, so mostly contemporary with my age. However I’m also certain that up to a point that taste was as much informed by the sound of scratchy 7″ singles that had belonged to my mum’s sister. Singles from the ’50s: Elvis. Lonnie Donegan. Anthony Newley. The Teddy Bears. All played on a mono Marconiphone record player. That tinny, thin, trebly kind of sound somehow connected and informed, I am sure, my musical preferences in later years. The Jam, though, would be the first contemporary group who made a significant impression, and whilst they were primarily a singles group, the albums weren’t half bad either. I chose ‘Setting Sons’ in the ’20 Albums That Changed My Life’ meme, so ‘All Mod Cons’ gets the nod here.
3 – The Photos ‘The Photos’ (1980)
This is the first album in this meme of ’20 albums that influenced my musical taste’ that I’d struggle to listen to all the way through nowadays. Yet it was one of the first albums I chose to buy for myself and I played it an awful lot at the time. Did the music press of the time label them (disparagingly) as a Brummie Blondie? I’m sure they must have, yet I owned this and not ‘Parallel Lines’ (that I taped from a friend – I don’t think they were bothered about a tape of this in trade…) so it gets my nod for being an album that influenced my taste for guitar driven punk/pop songs with a somewhat nasal female vocal (Carrie would call them whiny girlie singers).
4 – P.i.L ‘Metal Box’ (1979)
My friend Alan Penman bought ‘Metal Box’ when it was released and I have a vivid memory of borrowing it to tape on my dad’s stereo system. That memory involves me sitting in my dad’s armchair, headphones tight on my head, and a feeling of utter bewilderment filling my head in the spaces left by the, ahem, ‘music’ I was hearing. This was the first time I can remember hearing music that I truly did not understand, had no reference points to latch on to, but that was undeniably mesmerising and seductively Other. I was too young and too diverted by a multitude of other things to explore any of the contextual musical avenues pointed out by P.i.L. at the time (and in all honesty, much preferred the short Pop thrills of the Top 40), but I’m sure that hearing ‘Metal Box’ at the age of 13 allowed me to be more receptive to the music that influenced it when I came across it in later life.
Would I have been receptive to Simple Minds’ albums like ‘Empires and Dance’, ‘Reel to Real’ or ‘Sons and Fascination’ if I had not first been primed by ‘Metal Box’ as a thirteen year old? It’s a moot point, but I suspect those records would have connected regardless, and certainly with ‘Empires…’ and ‘Reel…’ there was a similar sense of them feeling strange and otherwordly. By the time of ‘New Gold Dream’ then I was already very much in thrall to Simple Minds, so it might be argued that it is an album that did not influence my musical tastes so much as reinforce them. Yet I would argue (with myself if no-one else) that the influence it held for me was as much to do with what followed, and the growing sense of what I did NOT like/want as much as what I did. As is well documented, the group’s trajectory after ‘New Gold Dream’ was to Stadiums and Big Rock Anthems, and certainly the roots of that are in ‘New Gold Dream’. Yet ‘Dream’ tempers that grandiloquence with a spacious spirituality, a reverence for the previous strangeness that had led them to this jumping off point. ‘New Gold Dream’ then in hindsight is an album where I understood the weighing up of personal interest versus group loyalty; started to grasp the idea of ‘this, this, this and this, but not that.’ A valuable lesson.
6 – Aztec Camera ‘High Land, Hard Rain’ (1983)
‘High Land, Hard Rain’ would be the album that firmly established my taste for melodic (and for want of a better word) jangly guitar Pop music. There would be something of a flood of other artists making similar sounds in the/my years to follow, but I am pretty confident in saying that this is the text from which everything, for me, flowed. The David Band design for the cover was highly influential too, as was the very similar Fraser Taylor work for The Bluebells and Friends Again, whose ‘Trapped and Unwrapped’ LP from a year later was also vying for inclusion here. Heady days.
7 – The Smiths ‘Hatful of Hollow’ (1984)
I thought relatively long and hard about whether to include ‘Hatful of Hollow’ in the list of albums that have influenced my musical taste and finally decided it would be churlish not to. It could be said that The Smiths were not significantly different to the sound forged by Aztec Camera and so arguably their records merely cemented a love for a certain aesthetic that Roddy Frame and his gang had established in my heart. And yet, those early Smiths singles did somehow stand apart… By the time ‘Hatful…’ was released of course I was fully conversant with everything collected there, either from the singles or the sessions taped from the radio so I’m not sure that, strictly speaking, the album itself was much of an influence, but the cultural reference points contained within its songs and aesthetic certainly were.
It’s not a record that I would, or even could, listen to again now. Morrissey’s vocal deliveries have grated for a long time, and lyrically much of it now feels very deliberately posed, which of course explains its success in connecting so strongly with disaffected young adults. A small part of me is rather ashamed at being taken in by it all, but I’m sure that a larger part of the 19 year old me would be ashamed of my present self, so that’s hardly worth bothering about…
8 – Weekend ‘La Variete’ (1982)
On reflection I think this one ought to have come before The Smiths’ record because it was probably my most played and loved album through the summer of 1983 and arguably hinted at treasures lying behind many more musical doors than, say, ‘Hatful of Hollow’ ever did (I’m not denying here the invaluable other cultural doors that The Smiths ushered me through). It’s an album I have come back to, and continue to come back to, on a fairly regular basis, and it always sounds sublime. An older fellow student at the Mackintosh School sneered when he saw it on my drawing board in the studio back in 1983 and called it ‘faux jazz’. I didn’t really know what he meant at the time, but he was wrong anyway.
Everything about this album feels perfect to me, from Wendy Smith’s cover art to the label design to the music itself. Easy listening for uneasy listeners sure enough.
9 – R.E.M. ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ (1985)
In 1985 ‘Fables/Reconstruction’ was the first R.E.M. album I heard and I found it remarkably seductive. Again, this was a record for which I had few reference points, mostly because I simply had no real musical education in terms of the things that were influencing the artists making these records. Even in 1985 I was not reading ‘the music press’ aside from ‘Smash Hits’ (something that in hindsight I’m quite thankful for) so I had no notion of the ‘scenes’ that were feeding the music that I found myself enjoying. One of my brother’s friends was, however, very much into ‘the American Scene’, and after listening to ‘Fables’ I quickly borrowed the previous R.E.M. albums, plus records by groups like The Rain Parade, Green On Red, Replacements etc. Those other groups would only more fully appeal to me in later years, but I found those R.E.M. records to be remarkably strange yet effortlessly accessible. Not understanding was, I think, a large part of the appeal. There was an opaqueness to their records at this time that hinted at outsider folk mythology, and although I couldn’t have identified it as such at the time, perhaps instinctively I felt drawn to elements of those threads even as a more visible part of me recoiled against anything that might be described as ‘hippie nonsense’. ‘Fables’ then not only opened avenues into ‘American Rock’ but also into a multitude of other peculiarities. I still listen to it on occasion and whilst it makes a great deal more sense to me now than it did in 1985, it retains, I think, a sense of keeping some mysteries cloaked, and that is certainly to its credit.
10 – Various Artists ‘Motown 20th Anniversary Album’ (1980)
I wish I could post, say, a Kent label compilation as the album that influenced my taste in music to take in Soul stylings, but the reality is that it was this Motown 20th Anniversary compilation that I bought ostensibly as a birthday present for my dad that I remember as a way in. In truth, Soul is not the musical genre that I would personally turn to by default when looking for something to listen to, but whenever I do hear something from, say, those Dave Godin Deep Soul Treasures compilations, it is pretty much overpoweringly magnificent. There is a strong argument to be made for compilations generally being the prime mover in terms of albums that influenced my taste.
11 – Various Artists ’20 Town and Country Greats’ (1974)
The first draft of this list of 20 albums that influenced my taste in music included ‘Grievous Angel’ by Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris as the album that opened my ears to the pleasures of Country music. Whilst that album undoubtedly was a crucial factor (and would have been way cooler to include here), on further reflection I decided that K-Tel’s ’20 Town and Country Greats’ from 1974 ought to represent the Country genre. It was my dad’s album, one of very few ‘contemporary’ records that we had in the house (record listening almost entirely restricted, as I’ve previously mentioned, to my mum’s late sister’s collection of 45s and EP boxes from the 1950s) and appropriately I posted this entry to FB on fathers’ day.
It would be misleading to suggest that as a youngster the music on this album made me a lifelong lover of Country music, and indeed if pressed as a teenager I would have disparagingly told you that it was, literally, ‘Dad Music’ and not my thing at all. Equally true, however, would be the fact that frequent exposure to these numbers by Johnny Cash, June Carter, Marty Robbins, Charlie Rich etc would have subconsciously laid the foundations on which later discovery of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris (and a host of others) would build.
12 – Fairport Convention ‘Unhalfbricking’ (1969)
There were moments in my piecemeal musical, ah, ‘education’ when what might be classified as Folk Music came to my attention, and when they did they almost always hit the spot. I have said this before, but primarily I remember a mixtape that Rob Young (then of Poppyheads, later author of the epic ‘Electric Eden’ book) made for me back in the summer of 1988. That tape introduced me to Bert Jansch, Bridget St John, John Renbourn, Nick Drake even (who I had never heard until that point). I think there was even a Fairport Convention track on there, yet it was not until years later that I felt the urge to fully listen to any of the Fairport albums and ‘Unhalfbricking’ was the one that really hooked me. As with, say, The Kinks, it is something of a shame that the early albums tend to get all the continued attention/reverence because Fairport Convention too made some great records through the 1970s and 80s that tend to be overlooked. Yet I remember that the sorely missed Neil Kulkarni thought that the run of four albums they released in 1968 and 1969 were pretty much a perfect body of work that rivals anything by anyone. As with many things, he was spot on.
13 – Archie Shepp/John Coltrane ‘New Thing At Newport’ (1966)
If ‘La Variete’ by Weekend made me at least receptive to the idea of Jazz in 1983, then it has also to be admitted that it took many more years before I even dipped a toe in the wider waters. Perhaps predictably, John Coltrane was the artist I’d decided I was going to check out, but the only two albums I could find in Glasgow’s Tower Records store in 1991 (I picked up Ultramarine’s ‘Every Man And Woman’ and a spare copy of Emily’s ‘Rub-Al-Khali’ on the same trip – both albums which could equally be said to have influenced my broader musical taste) were ‘Ballads’ and this split LP with Archie Shepp. The ‘Ballads’ LP was/is lovely, but this blew my mind. The Archie Shepp side in particular still sounds incredibly challenging and to a degree impenetrable but is wildly exciting. A bunch of Blue Note compilations later expanded my awareness and perhaps could have been included in this meme, but it’s this ‘New Thing At Newport’ album that really pushed me onto those.
14 – The Orb ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ (1991)
In the previous entry I mentioned picking up ‘Every Man And Woman Is A Star’ by Ultramarine back in 1991, and it was initially my pick for the album that influenced my taste in music to take in the electronic sounds of the late 1980s and early 90s. On further reflection however I’ve opted to go for ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ because I think the album, more than any other, captures my attraction to the idea of music as collage, as something that (in this case literally) picks elements from a multitude of sources and puts them together to make something new and otherworldly. If at the time of its release (and for a number of years thereafter) I would have denied in myself the appeal of what are undeniably Prog influences and references, then that was my loss (yet also, I would argue, for the time, my benefit).
15 – Omni Trio ‘The Deepest Cut Vol 1’ (1995)
The idea of a drum’n’bass album being the record that would influence my musical taste rather cuts against the grain of the genre, which was/is exemplified by 12″ singles. Those singles were something of a revelation to me in the mid 1990s and there was a period there when I was listening to little else. The records sounded more exciting and thrillingly new than anything I’d ever heard, my lack of ‘training’ as it were from the more hardcore end of the techno genre (and my not being a clubber) perhaps being a factor in that. The singles collected on Omni Trio’s ‘Vol 1’ double LP were already hard to find by the time I got switched on, so it’s 1995 release was perfect timing. ‘Shadowplay’, ‘Thru The Vibe’, ‘Together’ and especially the magnificent ‘Renegade Snares’ sounded like a whole new universe opening up, as indeed it was. The records still sound splendid, and if a little of the lustre has worn off that is perhaps as it ought to be for music that was so spectacularly of its time. It also points to the fact that the d’n’b sound so quickly became ubiquitous and consumed by the mainstream, but that’s the price of ‘success’ I suppose.
16 – Bruce Springsteen ‘Born To Run’ (1975)
It is nine years since something clicked with me and The Boss, allowing me to rather gleefully turn my back on beliefs I had held for decades. Springsteen wasn’t a bombastic boor and American Rock could be a marvellous beast. Who knew? Pretty much everyone else but me, as it turns out, but No Regrets and all that. There are other Springsteen albums I prefer to this (‘Darkness…’ and ‘The River’ nose ahead for me) but ‘Born To Run’, on its 40th anniversary was the one that eventually cut through the crap and cut me to the quick.
17 – One Man Bannister ‘Rubber Solo’ (2019)
I wrote about this album (a version of The Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’ by Matthew Bannister, formerly of beloved Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings) on its release back in 2019, and I’m interested to see, on re-reading the piece that even five years ago I was still somewhat hesitant to admit an appreciation for The Beatles. So whilst clearly ‘Rubber Solo’ was not the album that influenced my musical tastes sufficiently to make me perform an abrupt volte-face, it certainly played a significant part in changing my mind. Another significant player in that easing of my barriers was Unpopular’s Texas correspondent William Crain (formerly of The Soft Set and an erstwhile Tangents contributor), whose drip drip feeding of cuts on his excellent ‘The Sound The Past Makes’ blog certainly chipped away at my defences. In the past four years or so then I have certainly enjoyed much of The Beatles’ catalogue, including some of the subsequent solo work. I have even read books about them, which would have been utterly unthinkable prior to 2019. I retain reservations about the mediated repetitions of The Beatles ‘significance’ and the need to feed the capitalist beast of the industry, but I concede that this can be detached to an extent from the music, the songs, the records, the films. There are still groups from the same era whose work I rate higher (The Kinks, notably) but, as with Springsteen, I have finally given myself permission to enjoy The Beatles, and that feels fine.
18 – Trappist Afterland ’Se(VII)en’ (2018)
I had not heard of Adam Geoffrey Cole’s Trappist Afterland prior to venturing into the wilds of Totnes one evening in 2018 with Phil Wilson to see him/them perform a show. Also on the bill were Keith Christmas, who was terrific, and Nigel Mazlyn Jones, who was astonishingly good. Trappist Afterland, however, sounded and felt completely otherworldly and I was utterly captivated, so much so that when I got home I immediately bought all of the music then available (via Bandcamp) and played them on continuous loop for the next week whilst I decorated the living/dining room during the Easter school holidays. The 2018 LP ‘Se(VII)en’ then is the album that influenced my taste in music to take in that deliciously peculiar realm of mystical folk that dwells in the borderlands where the demons of Prog regularly make dawn raids to plunder and leave their dark marks. There is a new Trappist Afterland LP due later this year and there are few things I am as eager to hear.
19 – Genesis ‘Selling England By The Pound’ (1973)
The penultimate entry in the ’20 albums that influenced my taste in music’ meme is courtesy of Genesis. ‘Selling England By The Pound’ first came to my attention, I think, around 1974 or ’75 when I was eight or nine. It was during an Art class at Troon Primary School and I have this vague notion that it was all to do with one of my classmates wanting to draw something like the cover illustration. I suspect that they had borrowed the album from an older brother’s collection and were seduced by the image, but it did little for me then and whilst I like Betty Swanwick’s work for London Transport, it still does not really float my boat. The same might be said of the music, and whilst I am fairly certain I did not actually hear the record in 1974, by the time I was getting interested in music thanks to Punk and the New Wave, ‘Selling England By The Pound’ was assuredly the stuff that we were supposed to detest, and so detest it I did. It sits here then as an example of something that influenced my taste in so much as it fell into the category of what I did not like for many years. The whole realm of Prog indeed felt eminently resist-able in spite of the nudges made by the likes of The Orb, and in more recent years by that discovery of Nigel Mazlyn Jones and the contemporary mystical folk contingent, whose music nods quite heavily in the direction of Prog, I think. The Cherry Red box sets of progressive sounds from the 1970s have also had a part to play in opening my mind and ‘Selling England By The Pound’ at last sounds like something I can enjoy. It’s only taken half a century.
20 – ‘Celibidache Conducts Ravel’ (2018)
Chatting with my brother about this whole ‘albums that influenced my taste in music’ thing, we agreed that one of the key factors in discovering music in our youths through the late 1970s and 1980s (and indeed beyond into the early 1990s) was via cassette tapes. These would either be as a means of making a copy of an album a friend had but that we did not, or in the form of compilation tapes (I don’t think anyone in the UK called them ‘mixtapes’ until the Internet age). These tapes were vital forms of communication and combined with fanzines and letters were, for me at least, more essential that the inky music press or radio (which I seldom listened to). From this conversation we wondered what the contemporary equivalent would be? Snatches of music on The TikTok perhaps? Podcasts? Mixcloud playlists? Friends posting tracks on their social media feed? Certainly that’s how I discovered ‘Celibidache Conducts Ravel’. It was a click through from one of John Darnielle’s postings which appeared at one of those points in time when for whatever reason nothing in our libraries of music is doing it for us and we feel like a change, if only we knew what that change sounded like. And this time it was Ravel, which is something in my ignorance of Classical music that I never thought I would say, but there we are. My mum’s cousin David loved Classical and particularly Opera and would play albums when we visited him in Kilmarnock when I was young. It is a vivid memory, despite (or because of) the fact that I never understood the appeal. Nor am I entirely certain that I have the headspace to investigate much further at the moment, but this performance at the very least has teased open both the door and my mind. Here’s to another 20 previously unknown albums performing the same feat in the future.
The sight of the sun going down may no longer make me cry but the passing of things into darkness certainly brings a chill of melancholy. This is the inevitability of age of course, as inescapable as the cycles of nature. Things end. Things begin. Blink and you miss them.
Much of this is captured in ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’, the new, and perhaps the last, record by epic45, an artist I first came across back in 2002. The introduction was via Anthony Harding and his July Skies project, whose remarkable ‘Dreaming Of Spires’ LP I was fortunate enough to write about for ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ magazine. For me that record was like opening a doorway into a secret garden within a secret garden, a strange space inhabited by those eking out artistic existences beyond the reach of even the ‘underground’ never mind the mainstream. This was a realm of small country churches and derelict WW2 airfields. OS maps and the tracings of Beeching’s vandalism. Electricity pylons marching through forests. Ladybird books, Lone Pine paperbacks; the illustrations of Robert Lumley and Bertram Prance. Peculiarities at the end of the 20th Century.
Not quite so peculiar now, perhaps, as many of these infatuations have become more readily accessible in the intervening two decades thanks to the sprawl of the Internet and social media. Yet there remains something appealing and slightly Other about them. Profoundly analogue, perhaps, even whilst propagated and experienced in digital arenas. There is something of nostalgia at work, certainly, but equally certainly nothing so stultifying as a preoccupation with the past. This nostalgia is instead about drawing emotional strength, synthesising knowledge and experience into something new. The creative process (and the learning process) in a nutshell.
That nod to The Field Mice in the opening line here is apt too, for there are surely some shared points of interest and influence at work between epic45’s Ben Holton and Bobby Wratten of The Field Mice, Lightning In A Twilight World and others. Something to do with a certain kind of oddly assured fragility that casual misinformed cynics might wrongly classify as limp or fey. A fascination with the temporal distortions of liminal spaces, both physical and psychic. Spirits in their houses, ghosts in their machines. Usborne’s book on their childhood bookshelves. Things we all invent and project on our eyelids to make sense of what we feel around us. Music, photographs, words. Whispers or whatever.
Musically, it is certainly possible to listen to the thirty two minutes of ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ and to hear echoes of the likes of The Field Mice or Sarah labelmates Blueboy, more so perhaps than on any previous epic45 record. Album opener ‘New Town Faded’, with its humorous nod to a Joy Division title, could be the kissing cousin to something from the delicious ‘Unisex’ album, for example; ‘Be Nowhere’ an amorphous echo of the lilac 10” sleeved ‘Snowball’. If such comparisons make you shudder then that is most likely your loss. But then again we all blink and miss something sometimes.
There is also, in the music of epic45 and also throughout the nigh-on-20 year existence of Holton’s Wayside and Woodland imprint, a fascination with suburbia, for there are few more liminal spaces after all. Tracey Thorn has written eloquently about suburbia in her ‘Another Planet’ book of course, but she would likely agree that her heart was always in the city with the suburbs as something to escape, a place and a set of feelings to leave behind. Fond memories, perhaps, but only in hindsight and only with the weight of age to temper their adolescent frustration.
It is perhaps inevitable that anyone with a creative impulse would feel constrained by suburbia, its insistence on uniformity apparently the enemy of individual expression. Yet it is not necessarily the case. Artist John Myers spent most of the 1970s making photographs of the “garages, TVs, electricity substations, new builds and [his] neighbours” in Stourbridge. Collected in the 2017 book ‘The World Is Not Beautiful’, Myers’ photographs in fact suggest just the opposite. Beauty is in the everyday and God is in the mundane. In the work of epic45 there feels something of the same impulse. An embrace with suburbia where both parties naturally hold each other a little distantly. It wouldn’t do to be too familiar, would it? Holton, like John Myers is a recorder, making notes on the spaces he exists within and passes through. This is done musically of course, but in recent years it is increasingly also through photography, much of which finds place within printed books supporting the sounds, an excellent alternative means of giving physical artefacts to digitally distributed music.
There is an acceptance too, in the work of Myers and of Holton, I think, of the tension inherent in suburbia. These are spaces that by definition look both inwards and outwards, forever ripped and torn by duelling impulses that create a certain kind of neurotic anxiety. Agatha Christie recognised this in her 1969 Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’, a book which Kenneth Branagh made almost unrecognisable as the 2023 film ‘A Haunting In Venice’. Christie’s writing in the novel may be a long way from her finest, but although there is a distinct clumsiness about everything in the book, Christie does at least recognise the sordid repression of suburbia and the incipient mental health conditions it might generate.
It is this duality of existence that epic45 capture in the closing track on ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’. A six minute post-shoegaze, ahem, ‘epic’, called, appropriately enough, ‘Finality’, the song suggests movement and stasis at the same time. Travels to find “another place, another town” are plagued by both the disappointment and relief at finding them all the same. Suburbia being by default about uniformity. Everything is nowhere and nothing is everywhere. You can hear the echo of adolescent anger in the almost buried, shouted, vocal that counterpoints the same electronically treated sung lyric. It is both heartbreaking and oddly celebratory, like the work of David Lynch or the peculiar surrealism of Skids’ ‘Sweet Suburbia’ whose single sleeve oddly predicted New York anglophile band My Favorite’s ‘Detectives of Suburbia’. 17 years and an ocean apart. What was that about nods, whispers or whatever? Blink and you miss them.
‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ then is a punctuation mark in the creative journey of Ben Holton and epic45. A period perhaps, but only time will tell. It may unfurl in the future as a semi-colon, an elongated pause for breath before another plunge. One certainly suspects that even if this record sees the ‘end’ of epic45 there will be future Holton projects. His ‘Twelve Months’ work of music and photography as Birds In The Brickwork for example is already at volume three and must surely promise more. I admit I have not purchased the accompanying calendars (like most of the limited runs of physical artefacts from Wayside and Woodland, they tend to sell out quickly), but the cover image for the 2023 edition is thoroughly entrancing, like a West Midlands suburban Todd Hido outtake from ‘House Hunting’ or Robert Adams’ ‘Summer Nights, Walking’ in Water Orton instead of the Colorado Front Range. Looking for the echoes of Lawrence and Maurice Deebank rather than Emily Dickinson. Crumbling the antiseptic beauty, indeed.
‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ is out now on Wayside and Woodland. Don’t blink. Don’t miss it.
When I Was A Young Girl – Elspeth Anne (from ‘Mercy Me’ LP) Winter Woods – Charlotte Greig (from ‘Winter Woods’ LP) Hiljainen Kaupunki [Quiet City] – Sun Drawing (from ‘Aamut Kirjastossa [Mornings At The Library]’ LP) Long Mynd Snow – Tiny Leaves (from ‘Mynd’ LP) Snö – the British Stereo Collective (from ‘snö’ LP) Electronic Counterpoint III – The South Coast Synth Ensemble (from ‘Modern Electronics Volume 1’ LP) Tune Out, Turn Off, Drop In – The Noise Who Runs (digital single) Piles Copse – Quade (from ‘Nacre’ LP) Heart Attack ’84 – My Favorite (digital single) Beautiful – Royal Ottawa (from ‘Carcosa’ LP) Garlands – The Bathers (from ‘Sirenesque’ LP) I’m Not The Fella – John Douglas (from ‘John Douglas’ LP) Swamp Down – Lost Map presents Weird Wave (from ‘Lost Map presents Weird Wave’ LP) Chance Occurrence – Postal Blue (digital single) The Sweet Surrender – The Quarterlies (digital single) The Real Housewives of Porpoise Spit – Soft Covers (from ‘Soft Serve’ LP) The Clock Is Ticking – Ian M Bailey (from ‘We Live In Strange Times’ LP) Hope It Is A Feathered Thing – Large Plants (from ‘The Thorn’ LP) When They Fall – Jasmine Minks (from ‘We Make Our Own History’ LP) A Pair Of Brown Eyes (Live on The Phil Kennedy Show) – The Pogues (from The BBC Sessions 1984-1986’ LP) R.I.P. Shane MacGowan
‘My Noise Is Nothing’ would likely have passed me by were it not for a friend on The Social Media noting its relationship to the Future Sound of London’s ‘Lifeforms’ and the moments in the KLF’s ‘Chill Out’ when a little bit of percussion drifts over the landscape. Those references are well judged of course, but although this record is naturally touched by those stones from the past, it is also one that inhabits a sublimely impermanent position in space and time.
Lord Of The Isles appears to be the musical moniker of one Neil McDonald, whose extensive body of work (going by his Bandcamp page) seems to stretch back at least to 2010 and, on cursory further exploration, elegantly explores the realm that Warp used to call “Electronic Listening Music” (a phrase which might be to a degree problematic but is surely much better than the execrable “Intelligent Dance Music”). Certainly there is a delicious wealth of sub-genre hopping going in the catalogue, and if I prefer his more sedate and contemplative numbers to the groove-driven pulsations, then this probably says more about my age and place in life than anything else.
There is certainly something about stopping one’s world and climbing off and outwards (and/or inwards) within the sound of ‘My Noise Is Nothing’. Musically, aside from the FSOL and KLF references, it seems to share threads linking into the worlds of Basic Channel and also to Ultramarine, whose connections to mythical land and seascapes have long afforded electronica with a charming glow of warmth. Or, to be more up to date, perhaps it is the place where Bicep intersect the urban gloom of Burial’s shadows with a supple burbling of psychedelic meanders in the autumn mists. Oftentimes it is music that is barely there, as on ‘A Portrait’, where short refrains glisten like marsh gas in a seven minute plunge into sleeplessness. Or the following ‘Last Day’, which might be a wordless mystical cousin to Young Marble Giants’ ‘Final Day’ slowed down to nothingness. Frosted mullein glimpsed through sheers; drooping heads in sunflower fields at dusk.
Atop most of these sounds sit the words of Ellen Renton, a Scottish “Poet, Performer and Theatre-maker” whose work I was similarly unaware of until hearing this record. Now, I do still struggle with the spoken word at times, specifically with poets who, it feels to me, sometimes trap themselves within the rhythms expected of performance. The sing-song up and down tedium of misery and then a pause, held for breath, just so. Just when one expects it. How dull.
Ellen Renton just about escapes this black hole, and not just by weaving herself deliciously through the sounds made by McDonald. Her words are delicate cutters, delivered with a cadence that puts me in mind of Sue Tompkins, if Tompkins were a shade less abstract and fronted a band influenced more by Rome rather than by Yummy Fur. It is performative but not showy, poetry not Poetry, perhaps. If you get my drift.
Perhaps it is all at its best on the stunning ‘Don’t You Ache’. Renton is to the fore here; McDonald’s contribution a beautifully measured restraint of piano. Lyrically it is a delicious cascada of poignant imagery that scratches at wounds: “Sky hum in a sulk”; “Words gone tasteless like overdone gum”; “Every censored cut of morning” (or is it “cut of mourning”?); “The ease of war”; “That confident walk that cruelty has, like it knows it’ll never get caught”; “The devil’s advocate keeps pulling up a chair”… and… “Don’t you ache? Don’t you ache?” A cough on the corner. Feeling sorry for ourselves in our ultimate uselessness. Existential mirth of mourning. Or is it morning? Something like this. Or nothing.
It is tempting to assume that there is something in Renton’s (delivery of) language that is informed by the manner in which her own visual perception is determined by her albinism. She has written about her personal levels of visual perception and I think it’s worth quoting here:
“For some reason, vision and its parameters are ludicrously difficult to explain. Despite the frequency with which I’m asked this question (“how far can you see?”) I still struggle to give an illuminating response. I tend to reach for numbers first. I say I have 6 48 vision, so what a fully sighted person can see from forty eight metres away, I can see from six. This is a well-rehearsed phrase that rolls off the tongue. It gives brief satisfaction, and only brief, because it quickly becomes apparent that those arbitrary distances don’t comfortably translate to any real life situation. Forty eight metres is a near impossible measurement for our imaginations to accurately compute. Percentages tend to have the same effect – I cite 12.5, which is just a crude reworking of the initial figures.”
There is something intriguing in this “12.5 percent” as a rough guide to understanding what we hear Renton ‘describe’. The idea that human’s might be universally incapable of ‘seeing’ the same things. Or that we might at best ‘see’ only a fraction of the same things; experience a fragmentary part of what others experience. Despite a determination to proclaim our empathetic credentials, we are cursed (or perhaps blessed) to always Never Quite Get It. Reality is slippery.
There is something intriguing here too in the way in which voice might change, or at least warp received meaning. So when Renton says the word ‘ache’ it sounds, in her delivery, more like a sharp poke in the ribs than a soft sob of sorrow. The pokes feel sharper the deeper we get into the piece too, so that by its conclusion the phrase “don’t you ache?” is much more a poisoned dart of accusation than a gentle invitation for shared solace.
‘Don’t You Ache’ then might be a sublime highlight of ‘My Noise Is Nothing’, the loose tooth to which one cannot help but return, yet it is also true to say that its treasure is amplified by the brilliance it is surrounded by. There is nowhere on ‘My Noise Is Nothing’ where the level of engagement drifts. We are continually drawn into a space where meaning and feeling reverberate against one another, where glimpses of the tangible give way to shivers of extraordinary elegance. ‘My Noise Is Nothing’ is a record of magnificent quietude and one of the most essential releases of this, or any year.
It is easy to blink and miss things, particularly in these speedy times and particularly as we age and get slower. I’ve done this with Belbury Poly over the years, as a glance at Jim Jupp’s discography bears out. Seven albums, assorted singles and EPs of which I now realise I must have heard barely half. Where does (the) time go?
It’s the same with Jupp’s Ghost Box label. Prolific isn’t the word. Yet whilst there will doubtless be hordes of people who have avidly collected every single artefact over the past nigh-on two decades, I have found myself drifting in and out. It’s like one of those things that becomes a Constant by stealth. In the background, continually creating little gems that I discover almost by accident. A word spotted here and a nod encountered there. I tell myself I ought to treasure these things more, for if there is one thing true of Constants it is that they end. Yet I always end up blinking. Distracted again and wondering where (the) time goes.
So ‘The Path’ is a new record from The Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box label that emerges into my sight between blinks, as it were. It reunites Jupp with poet/author Justin Hopper, with whom he collaborated alongside Sharon Kraus on 2019’s ‘Chanctonbury Rings’ record. That project illuminated particular aspects of Hopper’s ‘The Old Weird Albion’ book which was published a couple of years previously, but the two have become so conflated in my personal timeline that I no longer remember if I read or heard his words first. Now I’m sure it ought not to matter, but I admit that there is something a little ‘off’ about hearing an American voice speaking about ancient English mystical landscapes. This perhaps says as much about my own hard-wired expectations and prejudices as anything else, yet perhaps not, for that peculiarly jarring juxtaposition of accent (aural, written and experienced) and subject is not entirely accidental, for in ‘The Old Weird Albion’ Hopper explicitly writes about his sense of being an imposter in an alien landscape, his ‘otherness’ amplifying the energies of place. This was particularly true of ‘The Chanctonbury Rings’ and the notion continues in ‘The Path’; indeed, was to an extent the initial impulse for the record whose seed was initially sown on a South Downs walk with Jupp.
‘The Path’, however, is less about specific physical and mythical space/place and more about the wider landscape. A landscape overlaid with Alfred Watkin’s lines and underlaid with the stones that humankind’s ancestors piled and aligned. Paths literal and metaphorical. Real and imagined. Physical and mythical. Where does (the) time go? It travels on these paths.
Musically ‘The Path’ is a smorgasbord of references that also meanders through time. The influences of 1970s film soundtracks by the likes of Roy Budd and Roger Webb might be discernible in the easy-going Jazz ambience, but it feels more as though those influences have themselves been fed through a blender set to mid/late 90s downbeat Hip Hop so that at times it conjures memories of the likes of Spacer’s ‘Atlas Earth’ LP or those earlier U.N.K.L.E. collaborations like ‘The Time Has Come’ before Mainstream Success beckoned and it all got a bit banal. Max Seidi’s drums and percussion no doubt help create these kinds of connections, at least in my head, whilst occasional Poly collaborator Christopher Budd’s bass, guitars and sitar also contribute to that early ‘70s mild psychedelia of children’s TV and fiction created by middle-aged survivors of the age of Aquarius. It’s not quite Prog, but you sense it could easily head off on that tangent, and fair play if it did. Elsewhere there is something medieval in the music too, which perhaps is down to Jesse Chandler’s (of Midlake, Mercury Rev & Pneumatic Tubes) flute and clarinet which colour proceedings with a more ancient psychedelia of nutmeg and mushrooms. It’s a terrific flavour, and indeed this notion of casting back and drifting forwards permeates the entirety of ‘The Path’ and might be the single unifying ‘theory’ in all the Ghost Box catalogue, filled as it is with reference to (Pop)cultural history and the insistence of personal recollection. Each moment instantaneously becomes the past, which immediately begins its decay and dismemberment within our perception. We mould these into artefacts according to our skills. In Jupp’s case, these vessels of memory are cast in the magic of music whilst in Hopper’s, the plasticine of text. Together they combine admirably to make a record where the co-dependence of the strands might result in something greater than the sum of the parts, but where each can equally flourish by itself. Instrumental versions of some of these tracks and Hopper’s written sleeve notes persuade us of the skills of each. ‘The Path’ then is a record of music with words spoken, as opposed to a record of spoken word. Small distinctions can be the most important.
Occasionally, however, ‘The Path’ does leaves me frustrated and those frustrations are with some of the words. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this, but there is something about any mention of faeries that sets my teeth on edge and so Hopper’s reference to these mythical inhabitants of folk lore makes me perhaps irrationally irritated (or is it entirely rational?). It tilts everything off the axis of mystical intrigue and into the realm of nonsense. Admittedly there is a vague hint of it all being tongue-in-cheek, but frankly humour is overrated. The introduction of moths, on the other hand, feels nicely done. These appear as some kind of metaphorical form of Existential Outsider as Hopper’s text dives into a more Noir-ish arena to which the musicians respond (or is it the other way round?) with the kind of Film Noir jazz soundtrack that Robert Altman might have utilised. These moths, however, seem to metamorphose in reverse and inhabit a form that exists between worlds. This feels like a lazy symbol of identity fluidity (okay, okay, I’m probably reading this wrong) which ultimately results in the naïveté of placing hope in ‘the children’. This endlessly repeated and quaint idea that our offspring will somehow, ahem, magically transform the realms in which we dwell makes me grimace, although I appreciate this may just be thirty years of teaching teenagers leaving a stain of pessimism on my soul. The Future Will Be Better seems increasingly like a laughable concept, however. And how many generations have ultimately thought the same? How many have reached the end of their lives and realised the inevitable ridiculousness of that hope they once held dear?
So yes, as Hopper suggests in his opening words of the record, we follow The Path despite knowing better. Indeed, we follow The Path because we know better. Because we understand the falsehoods that ‘better’ contains. We follow The Path because of an instinctive awareness that Belief > Knowledge and because we sense that tripping backwards is ultimately healthier than swaggering forwards. This is where (the) time goes.
