Growing up doesn’t stop the past from tapping us on the shoulder—throw on the right song and, suddenly, you’re staring through a fogged-up mirror at half-lit fragments of everything you thought you’d left behind. The Balloonist‘s album Dreamland floats in that space, slowly demisting the glass.
First up, ‘Look at Us Then,’ transports to Summer, 1986. It’s warm and granular, sounding almost like Tycho in its sensory immersion. You can smell the meadows that once backed onto your childhood garden (now a new-build maze). Next, you’re wheeling a BMX down a B‑road fringed with cow‑parsley, the sky a perpetual 9 p.m. sunset. The school holidays stretch out, endless. Time, in that instant, is elastic and care-free.
Ben Holton, the Staffordshire musician known for two decades of rural field recorded reveries with epic45, records solo as The Balloonist when his memories demand a softer focus and more decay. Dreamland is his third flight, but its impulse is rawer: the album took shape while Holton’s father’s health declined, and later, in the silence that followed his passing. He processed fragments of FM radio, home‑taped pop and field recordings on a Studer reel‑to‑reel, letting oxide flake and warble until the music felt as fragile as the thoughts it carried. Wayside & Woodland’s cottage‑industry ethos—a few hundred CDs, hand‑stamped sleeves—makes that intimacy feel quietly ceremonial, as if the whole release could fit in a shirt pocket.
‘Headphone World’ evokes an impossible nostalgia through its lo‑fi closeness—like that first Walkman pressed to your ears. Faded pad synths and toy‑box chimes wander beside a pillowy bass line, the track humming like a battery‑powered secret you kept from grown‑ups. Holton leaves plenty of headroom; hiss becomes part of the harmony, like the sound of rain on a tent roof, the kind that makes you feel safe inside.
The album’s centre opens with ‘Meadow Melting’. A crushed‑tape orchestra sighs in slow motion as reverbed guitar sketches arcs of light, while Blade Runner piano trickles down like liquid sunbeams through clouds of dust. Here, grief’s faint outline first appears: not loud, but undeniable, hiding in the flutter of a stretched note. It’s the moment the record stops feeling purely nostalgic and starts asking why we mythologise the past at all.
‘Open Fields’ introduces percussion—muted, ponderous beats that hang between a spidery Cocteaus guitar sparkle and sub‑bass throb. The groove is half‑asleep, as though time itself is reluctant to move on. Then ‘Through the Canopy’ lifts the lid of childhood entirely: birdsong loops with rising synth pads; a slurred vocal sample—human yet indistinct—reminds you of dreaming voices heard through bedroom walls. Memory, Holton seems to suggest, is vocal but rarely articulate.
If the first half is dappled rays of light, ‘Cooling Towers’ shifts the palette towards an overcast pastel purple. Distant pylons loom above lush Staffordshire hills; static fizz and crackle ripple at the track’s edge like electricity leaking from a fence. It’s the album’s most haunting vista—beauty framed by industry, innocence watched over by mute concrete.
‘Between Dreams’ plays like one of those BBC test‑card tunes from 1984, but warped by years of magnetic drift. Melodies overlap and blur, an accidental montage of the programmes watched on the sofa at dawn. Holton distils that limbo into three aching minutes, and it lands as Dreamland’s thematic peak: the space between what happened and what we choose to remember.
The closing diptych is where Dreamland hits hardest. ‘Leaves Begin to Turn’ is the postcard from summer’s edge, its melody coated in gentle wow and flutter as though the cassette had been left on a dashboard too long. Every synth swell bends downward, and an almost‑subliminal choir sighs beneath, the sun’s heat bleaching Polaroid snaps of the first yellow signs of autumn.
‘Back to the House’ is a fragile motif, barely there like its image is fading the moment you recall it. Near its end, a home‑taped voice enters: a father tucking a child in—“It’s bedtime now… lights off… sleep tight” the reply, “watch the bedbugs don’t bite!” The sample is innocent and unflashy, but it lands like a hand on the shoulder, reminding you that every real moment ends, and nothing loved is ever really forgotten.
Throughout, Holton never overplays his hand. There are no grand crescendos, hardly any drums, and few of the usual hauntological flourishes. Instead, he lets the medium do the talking: fluttering tape, soft hiss, and gentle colour‑shifts carry the emotion. That quiet discipline places Dreamland in epic45’s orbit, yet gives it its own co‑ordinates. Where epic45 charts lanes and hedgerows, The Balloonist traces the neural pathways that remember them. The compromise is momentum; the record drifts, and its power depends on how willing you are to step into the dream.
Despite Holton’s restraint, his ability to turn personal snapshots like these into a shared reverie feels truly special, and even with its lulls, Dreamland offers passages of undeniable beauty.
‘Dreamland’ is out 2nd May on Wayside & Woodland Recordings.
