Youngs, Richard

Youngs, Richard

Ein Klein Nein

Vhf

Mysterious and minimal instrumental album by Richard Youngs, dreamt at home and recorded quickly in Glasgow’s Green Door Studio. Centered on a single piano chord and bare snare strikes, Youngs builds a haunting atmosphere in four episodes, featuring his guitar, organ, harmonica, and voice. The reductive and hypnotic approach here recalls his early classics like Advent and Festival. Another essential work from the prolific and truly unique musician. Creator of nearly one hundred albums, Richard Youngs somehow continues to find ways to surprise listeners. Even in these dark, dark ages where everyone knows everything, Youngs finds new creative ways—recording albums of accessible “rock” and folk music for the overground Glass and O Genesis labels, playing high-concept disco in the critically acclaimed AMOR; and releasing an extensive and bewildering series of albums where he plays all instruments with his feet!

Youngs, Richard

No Fans Compendium

Vhf

No Fans Compendium is a deluxe, limited-edition seven-disc set of Richard Youngs’s recordings for his long-running private No Fans label. Five CDs are the artist’s personal selection from his No Fans releases, all of which were issued in tiny editions (20-50 copies) and only available for sale at his rare shows or at Glasgow’s now-defunct Volcanic Tongue shop. In addition, Youngs has included two full discs of material previously unavailable in any form: a recording from 1989 predating his earliest widely known work, and a new recording from late 2014.  Unbeatable as a survey of Youngs’s career, everything here is of equal quality to his over-the-counter releases. In keeping with his penchant for unpredictable stylistic mashups and reinventions, there are folky laments, achingly beautiful “songs,” tape collage, rude prog noise, minimalist experiments, multi-tracked vocals, etc. Each disc is housed in an individual card folio with artwork repurposed from the original releases.

Youngs, Richard

No Retreat In Comfort

Ba Da Bing!

These are the last remaining copies of the 300-run CD that Richard Youngs sold on his US 2013 tour, which saw him travel up and down the East Coast, most memorably playing the support slot at the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh, NC, opening for John Cale. In his own words: “No Retreat in Comfort was made on a week-long recording bender when I found myself home alone. I remember the weather was dreadful, and I rarely ventured outside. I borrowed a Moog Source, and the album started off as an hour and a half of synth jams. I then fitted the songs to my favourite jams. Having done the recording, it lay dormant for over a year when I remixed it for the tour-only CD. Influences? I don’t think it sounds anything like it, but I have a memory of having heard the bonus disc of the McCartney II re-release at about this time and rather enjoying it. I also recall having a Gaelic Proverb book out of the library.”

Youngs, Richard

Summer Through My Mind

Ba Da Bing!

Richard Youngs presents his debut recording for Ba Da Bing Records, and the label is looking forward to a long relationship. For Summer Through My Mind, Youngs pushes himself into a challenging new sphere yet again. A renowned musician with over 40 albums to his name, he goes somewhere he never has before—to the heart of American music. Summer Through My Mind is a country music album, warped through Youngs’s ambidextral mind. A warning: it’s not like any country album one has heard before. There are familiar elements scattered about—slide-guitar, heartfelt vocals, dark lyricism—but these pieces exist like alienated rocks from a planetary explosion of long ago. The discomfited guitar lines create patchy connections, and Youngs’s unmistakable singing seals things right up. The album draws together a story Youngs wrote as a child, involving bad people and dark spirits (“Story of Jhon” which has a vocal contribution from Simon Joyner), with some lyrics written by his own six-year-old son. In a rare chance to see him perform outside of Europe, Youngs will be playing select US dates in 2013, including the Hopscotch Festival in Durham, NC, and at the ISSUE Project Room in New York.