“I think I’ve always done what the hell I wanted to do, and if there is a theme [across my work], it’s that. I’m pretty convinced that you could play one album, and then play another, and someone might not hear the link at all. But the link is that, at the time, it gripped me, and I needed to do it.”
It is with this disarming simplicity in an interview with Bandcamp Daily in 2024 that Richard Youngs, in an always fruitless but rewarding attempt to map his impressive discography, reveals to us the hidden impulses of a body of work as expansive as it is unpredictable. With more than 150 releases, including albums, EPs, and singles, both solo and collaborative, Youngs’ career refutes any procedural linearity, drawing a vast cartography that passes through countless languages and approaches, guided by intuition and a sense of constant discovery and challenge. Dating back to the mid-1980s, immersed in the then fertile British industrial scene, the Glasgow-based musician has since driven a constant activity that had its first major revelation with the release of the now classic ‘Advent’ in 1988, which Alan Licht considered one of the 10 classics of minimalism, and which has been continuously nurtured through passages of folk, drone, electrified rock, a cappella records, idiosyncratic flirtations with prog, experiments with electronics, country “commissions,” and everything else that has inspired him at any given moment. Without a hint of dilettantism. Instinct, joy, bravery in making these other songs something of his own. And it is.
Hence, arriving at a general overview of these desires, even if only superficially, will always be a thankless task. Something will always be left out. In the 1990s, he collaborated frequently with Simon Wickham-Smith, in a symbiotic relationship marked by albums such as ‘LAKE’ or ‘Ceacescu’, where fake percussion coming from the back of the room, hypnotic drones, spoken word, or tape reveries paint an almost tactile aural mosaic in his very DIY spirit of discovery, while also recording solo albums for respected labels such as VHF or Table of the Elements. At the turn of the millennium, he began a fruitful relationship with Jagjaguwar, an affair that led him to a broader collective consciousness through albums such as ‘Naive Shaman’ – enveloping mantras for a profusion of voices and resonances and a good starting point for noobs – or ‘Summer Wanderer’ – a cappella hymns – and in the reissue of CDrs previously confined to his ever-active No Fans label – ‘Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits’ is the pop album we didn’t deserve, but which exists because it has to. In the following decade, albums on Alter and Ba Da Bing! followed—for ‘Summer Through My Mind’, he was asked for a country album, and Youngs delivered a very personal vision of what that could be—and a curious/fascinating series of albums for guitar played with the feet, appropriately titled ‘Foot Guitar’, which far exceed the expectations that such a gimmick would suggest. Already in this decade, and continuing to leave valuable work on his No Fans label, he also recorded for Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle, with ‘Modern Sorrow’ revealing that the influence of someone like Drake can be a blessing, on an album where his voice is carried away by the neon of autotune over minimal piano chords and a repetitive drum machine in two long, passionate digressions. Always unpredictable, always good. Blessed be.
BS
