Duncan Sumpner’s solo project continues to flourish in the rural outskirts of Sheffield. ‘Aerial Days’ varies massively from track to track, with each offering standing independently from the others in terms of production. All of them however, retain an exploratory relationship with sonic reflection and the head-spinning depth charge of deep seatedness.
‘Pink By White’ is a reverb laden echo chamber of a song, immersed in FX and similarly ‘Wolves Amongst Snowmen’ is a deep-set lo-fi plethora of influences which dip and sway in a sea of long-wave radio frequencies. The bass pedal signals the arrival of clarity, but the dreamlike shifts prevail in a dense mist of swirling guitar noises.
As the blurred cocktail rattles within hazed-out walls of experimental instrumentation, the abstract qualities of the vibrating jam become more prominent. ‘Stars Form Birds’ loops and shudders to an improvised and wandering pulse, dropping out to embrace ethereal, perhaps cosmic spaces in a chiming mass of harmonics.
The Beatles cover, ‘Dear Prudence’ was a response to a request to appear on a Radio one Lennon tribute, and the track is given a suitable psychedelic kick by Sumpner’s partiality to eyelid-heavy delay and echoing looseness.
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Elsewhere, the piano-driven sonic trickery of ‘Wintered’ hums and buzzes into focus with the help of some African sounding percussion and a chorus of recorders. Half-step brass sounds gurgle and bubble with synthesised sonic accompaniment as the gentle rattlings of sleigh bells counteract the Sandman-styled influence on subconsciousness.
High-level humming and scratching combine to envelop the gentle strings of the final track before a sublime brass sound is counted in by the deep yet fragile chiming.
Combining to make a delicate, ambient whole that is fragmented by the flash of mental imagery, ‘Aerial Days’ is sold over to the time-slowing evolutionary feel of an all-encompassing style of production that places the songs at the splintered core of each mix.
It’s the end result of carefully created tapestries that sound like 4-second exposures of still life, an interesting and intriguing mixture of the sublime and the abstract.
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