This review first appeared on Caught By The River and then also on International Times.
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.
‘Flowers Made Of Light’ by Ben Holton is out now on digital and limited edition CD from Wayside and Woodland: https://waysideandwoodlandrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-made-of-light
