Some musicians get their first glimpse of movie star, flinch within the glare of the highlight, and shortly burrow their method again underground. However Duncan Sumpner, you think, knew from the start that fame – even fame on a really small and grassroots indie stage – was not for him.
A schoolteacher from Oughtibridge, a residential village on the outskirts of Sheffield, Sumpner has launched a string of data underneath the title Songs Of Inexperienced Pheasant with out ever fairly getting into the sunshine. The challenge’s origin story speaks volumes about his elusive strategy. A demo that Sumpner despatched to Fats Cat in 2002 turned a fixture on the label’s workplace stereo. However after they determined to get involved to supply him a file deal, the e-mail bounced again, and it took them years to trace him down. Within the years since, there have been just a few transient interviews, a smattering of dwell exhibits and completely nothing like a synergistic model partnership or engagement-boosting Tik Tok marketing campaign. On the top of his revulsion with fame, Thom Yorke titled a Radiohead music “How To Disappear Fully”. You think about Sumpner would possibly write one thing related: “How To By no means Be Discovered In The First Place”.
Given the relentlessly hungry state of the music business, logic would appear to dictate that this kind of strategy to 1’s artwork can be a street to obscurity. But for Sumpner, working at a take away appears to be understanding slightly effectively. Over time, Songs Of Inexperienced Pheasant has accrued a formidable catalogue of music and a small however deeply dedicated fanbase, whereas working at his personal velocity and on his personal phrases, together with his uncommon releases now popping out by way of the tiny Galway-based micro-imprint Rusted Rail.
4 years on from the discharge of 2020’s warmly acquired When The Climate Clears comes new album Sings The Passing. Its seven tracks are rooted within the kind of acoustic music that’s nowadays generally known as folks. However there’s an more and more expansive and rules-free high quality to Sumpner’s strategy – a spirit of invention that sees songs augmented by uncommon and startling results, or come free from their moorings and drift off into clouds of dreamy atmosphere. The impact is each unusual and hanging. Consider Flying Saucer Assault at their most windswept and folksy, or think about the seldom-trod midpoint between Crosby, Stills, Nash & Younger and William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and also you’ll be no less than pointing in the correct route.
Make no mistake, there are some beautiful songs right here. “Have Persistence” hymns the deserves of a life lived within the sluggish lane, promising that “every little thing involves those that wait” over a lopsided drum beat and a watercolour smudge of acoustic guitar. Even in its extra typical moments, although, Sings The Passing pulls off some daring manufacturing tips. Take “By Tomorrow”: on the floor, it’s one of many album’s prettier moments, an eddy of softly sung vocals and gently spiralling fingerpicking. However Sumpner renders it with a swirling, aqueous high quality, and weird sounds might be heard issuing up from the deep, with groans of suggestions and jags of guitar noise that erupt like distant depth costs.
Elsewhere, there’s the sense of Sumpner stretching his compositional muscle tissues. “The Visiting Hours And The Rain” is split into actions, commencing with a cascade of sampled voices looped and multitracked right into a homebrew choir, earlier than advancing by way of passages of shimmering echo, pastoral folks and found-sound atmosphere. “Personal Prophecy”, in the meantime, remembers the beautiful melancholy of Leeds post-rockers Hood, its 11 minutes of dolorous vocals and cloudy drones concurrently wet-weekend dreary and imbued with a desolate magnificence. Sumpner clearly relishes these moments of abstraction. However each time he’s on the threat of getting too on the market, there’s all the time some kind of refined musical interjection that pulls issues again from the brink. Hear how that trumpet cuts by way of the gentle ambient lull on the centre of “Whitsun Ladies”, like a lighthouse beacon piercing mist.
Songs Of Inexperienced Pheasant began out some twenty years in the past with Sumpner alone, at dwelling, tinkering with a four-track recorder. In a way, issues haven’t modified – he’s nonetheless that earnest, inquisitive solo musician, tweaking faders and twiddling dials within the hope of recreating the sounds in his head. However Sings The Passing finds him nonetheless rising and evolving, the lo-fi sketches of outdated reworking into one thing deep, wealthy and symphonic. The album concludes with a music known as “Who Wants Cash”, a mumbled however stunning acid-folk meditation that appears like a turning away from the world. This, after all, is the territory the place Sumpner feels most snug. However it additionally captures one thing of why his music resonates. Unhurried, unshowy, totally unconcerned with consideration: all it asks from us is to nonetheless our brains, and easily hear.