> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Songs of Green Pheasant :: Sings The Passing - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/songs-of-green-pheasant-sings-the-passing/ - Published: 2026-10-13T05:27:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T05:27:24.000Z - Description: Ambient folk, Pastoral fog, tape fragments and a buried brass band. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Ambient Folk ### Duncan Sumpner was eight when he joined a brass band as a cornet player, and he dates the first time music overwhelmed him to a night the band played “In the Bleak Midwinter”: his heart thumping, tears arriving before he had decided anything. --- Twenty years of murky folk records later, that sound is still somewhere in the room. Asked recently by the Rome-based blog Triste whether he was a musician, Sumpner said no. He could write a song and make sounds that carry his ideas; playing at the level of Joe McPhee was something he could only dream about. The boy who learnt the cornet in a band grew into a man who works alone, at home, with tape, and who seems to leave performance to other people. Fat Cat found out how far that goes. They kept his 2002 kitchen demo playing in the office, then spent years failing to reach him because the contact details led nowhere. The debut arrived in 2005; since 2012 the records have come out, slowly, through Rusted Rail, a micro-label in Galway. *Sings The Passing*, released on 11 April 2025, closes what Sumpner calls a trilogy after *Soft Wounds* and *When the Weather Clears*. He has described the three records as an account of getting through a testing period of life, with a loose narrative that ends, here, in atonement. He offers nothing more specific, and the album keeps the same counsel. [Sings The Passing by Songs of Green Pheasant](https://rustedrail.bandcamp.com/album/sings-the-passing?ref=hwaelmag.com) The first thing the record does is multiply him. “Dark” opens on old, echoing tape and a low drone, then worn strings, a whispered voice, some horns, and for a few minutes nothing tries to comfort you. “The Visiting Hours and the Rain” begins with a choir that turns out to be one man, his voices sampled, looped and layered into a congregation. Then the track moves off towards something closer and more acoustic: guitars and piano, sometimes bare, sometimes swallowed by reverb, with recorded voices and brass passing through. Visiting hours belong to hospitals and care homes, to the time when the living are let in for a while. Even the gentlest songs carry something underneath. “By Tomorrow” is among the most delicate things here, a soft voice over fingerpicked guitar, yet below the melody distant disturbances keep surfacing until they become part of the song’s weather, a faint, domesticated memory of Wolf Eyes under a folk tune. “Private Prophecy” shows what this habit costs. Over eleven minutes, instrumental passages rise from drones and electronic texture and sink back again; trumpet and tubular bells break long pauses, and the melancholy sits close to Hood. There is a remarkable piece somewhere inside it, but Sumpner does not cut, and the middle stretch asks for more patience than it gives back. LISTENING NOTES / 01 01 02 03 BRASS When the trumpet enters “Whitsun Girls”, where is it standing? Inside the song, or somewhere down the street, passing? UNDERNEATH In “By Tomorrow”, stop following the guitar. What is moving below it, and at what point does the noise start to feel like weather? CONGREGATION How many people do you hear singing at the start of “The Visiting Hours and the Rain”? When do you remember it is one man with tape? Patience is, in any case, what the album asks for. “Have Patience” is its most direct song: a limping drum, rolling piano, guitar blurred at the edges, and a refrain promising that everything comes to whoever waits. On a record named after passing, the promise has an edge to it. The waiting is repaid by “Whitsun Girls”, to my mind the summit of the record. Autumnal melancholy, a misty melody, the dream-pastoral arrangement: all familiar Sumpner materials. Towards the middle the song thins almost to nothing, and out of that quiet a trumpet comes in alone, a single brass line with nothing around it, a band instrument heard in solitude by a man who once played cornet in one. The album closes with “Who Needs Money”, murmured acid folk, the voice almost mistaken for breath. It sounds like someone turning away from the world, a gesture Sumpner has been perfecting since Fat Cat’s emails first bounced back, and it closes like a door pulled to from the inside. ---