Richard Youngs

It's September 2005 when "The Wire", having spotted the imperious "The Naive Shaman" on the horizon, puts Richard Youngs on its cover, effectively making him the most famous librarian (the least he deserves: we're hardly talking about some random Mazzacane Connors) among his strictly cultured & refined readership. For him too, a sober shot, as the magazine's aesthetic demands: a mid-shot with a green forest in the background, a reflective habitat here stripped of the sorcerous aura of the freak-folk playbook; other photos scraped up online show him on a pebbly beach, at the water's edge, drenched in the "dancing" glints of light on water. It's no coincidence that the natural element, beyond any improbable (if agreeable) ecological undertones, is an essential complement to the way we picture Youngs, as if it aspired to the status of the physical and mental perimeter within which the Glasgow musician lives and works. And note: this is not the starting point for that pernicious return to a "state of nature" so fashionable among today's mimeographed neo-hippies, but rather the fraught rediscovery of oneself inside a "containing" organism, weighing up its logic and forces, which turn out to mirror our most primal emotions.

With every last trace of urban toxin expelled, Youngs seems more than ever aligned with a "peripheral" conception of musical discourse, a non-place where craftsmanship, intuition and limited resources interpenetrate. Almost every artistic choice, in fact, stems from a lack, from happenstance and improvisation, from the (non-)availability of certain instruments (see the album recorded at Jim O'Rourke's house, using the sampler left behind by Tony Conrad). "Having a choice can be a terrible thing," Youngs himself explains. "When I recorded 'Sapphie', the only instrument I had was a classical guitar, so I played that. If I'd had more instruments on hand, I would have frozen up or lost sight of the goal." And yet it's precisely this ability to turn necessity into virtue, wringing every last drop out of the limitations of the medium ("Saying so much with so little..."), that makes our man a unique figure on the music scene of the last two decades. The rest is handled by music that acts as a watershed basin fed by waters flowing in from the most disparate places: Anglo-Saxon folk, minimalism, noise avant-garde, drone music, singer-songwriter craft, avant-rock, musique concrète, electronics, and now even synth-pop (the enchanting "Beyond The Valley Of Ultrahits").

Put like that, it sounds like a shapeless muddle, but Richard is anything but unhinged, and you know it (we "sapphie" it) well. If anything, he's a magical enchanter, a translator of dreams: the heir to Canterbury, to R.I.O., a "free-rock energizer" capable of moving listeners with works that shine through their daring, their melodic sense and their sense of "construction". One might be tempted to call him a "total musician", if only it were possible to shake off the cumbersome baggage that label drags along with it (sterile professionalism, congenital megalomania, creative sclerosis already setting in by the twentieth album, etc.). In Youngs's poetics, the guiding principles are emotion and humility, and that observation alone would be enough to wipe away with one stroke any residue of the self-satisfied drool typical of the artist "who never has to ask".

It's precisely this apparent simplicity, not to say low profile, that forms the leitmotif of "Sapphie" (1998, reissued by Jagjaguwar in 2000), remembered by everyone (the few who know it, at least) as the album that's a litany for a dead dog, the one with "Fido"'s pawprints on the cover (adorable naiveté!). Three long tracks for voice and classical guitar, recorded live in one take, zero overdubs; nonetheless a milestone of the '90s. If one wanted to slot it into one of the watertight compartments typically used to divide up the British musician's output, it becomes almost inevitable to open the drawer labelled "singer-songwriter". A justified but debatable choice, especially because, 90% of the time, whoever promotes such pigeonholing overlooks one glaring detail: the thread holding together the bulk of Youngs's output remains minimalism, understood both as an organizing principle and as a mode of execution. It is minimalism that absorbs "the other", whether that's the mercurial, intimately "Canterbury-esque" droning of "Festival" (1996), or the Weimar Republic-style piano 3/4 time underpinning the debut "Advent" (1990); "Sapphie", in this sense, is no exception. Just as the predominantly British (and ancestrally folk) undercurrent of musical influences is no exception either: the likes of Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, a John Martyn stripped of any blues animosity; the Nick Drake of "Pink Moon", above all, whose cryptic geometries are here stretched to unlikely extremes.

England, as noted. So little (or no) John Fahey, the illustrious godfather of "primitive folk", who, from the first post-rock Made in USA onward, has become a kind of toll booth for anyone daring to approach the "creative guitar" (what a haughty label, almost worse than "Intelligent Dance Music"). And while Fahey's sense of "spatial" expansiveness lingers, what's missing is the narrative linearity and descriptive quality of his sprawling compositions, the division into movements, the highs and lows of the exposition. Even when the dusting-off of folk roots becomes more perceptible, "Sapphie" lacks the consoling, restorative feeling Fahey holds toward tradition: a kind of compass for orienting oneself in the present, the ideal home one can always return to. Youngs's approach is more a spinning in place, blissfully dazed. If Fahey explores a place, Youngs gets lost in it. Sometimes he doesn't even stop to look at the landscape. Often there isn't even a landscape to look at, because everything seems intoxicated by the it of "Gabrieli-esque" ("Raëlian"?) memory: an abstract entity that encapsulates the imitation of existence, the mimicry of vital processes.

Simultaneously a relic, a celebration and a funeral wake, "Sapphie" pulses with a corpuscular light, at once faint and blinding. "Soon It Will Be Fire" opens the record (from then on a fixture of live sets in acoustic form), and immediately there's the circularity of the major-key harmonic pattern, open tuning, bony fingerpicking, an immensely sweet warmth, a burning/melting without agony. Words that speak of fire, of purification: "For Sapphie I had tons of lyrics already written. I'd kept a diary in which I jotted down one sentence a day, for a whole year. Toward the end of the year I picked out the best sentences." Disjointed, unstable verses, smeared with a magic that makes "Photographs out of a speeding car's window", sung with barely a thread of voice, almost unbearable.

Ah yes, that voice. A voice that climbs, trembling, rippled with a quiver of elongated vowels, uncertain falsettos, the occasional slight pitch wobble. And it's all wonderful because – forgive the platitude – it speaks (or rather, imitates) the language of the heart. The heart overflowing, as if it couldn't contain the weight of its emotions, and so it darts off into the density of the stars, armed with lofty, arduous phrases ("A Fulness Of Light In Your Soul"), heading toward heights impossible to reach yet stubbornly, painfully longed for.

Across the eighteen minutes of "The Graze Of Days", the entire British folk tradition is transfigured, all thanks to an intricate harmonic-melodic figure that curls and turns back on itself, as if in some careless evolution. The track's key is E minor, but in laying out the four low notes of the "series" (each held for 2/4 of every bar), sly old Youngs opens with the subtonic (the low D, on an open string), creating a penetrating sense of instability that the rest of the piece, caught between mimicry and folding back on itself, certainly does nothing to resolve. In the unguarded gaps left open, out come sparingly doled-out embellishments on the top three strings: arpeggios suggesting ancient visions plucked out of the flow of history, soft refrains set against a single vocal line, itself of rare beauty. The variations on this pattern are few but telling: chief among them, the use of overtones rising while the bass notes slip in the opposite direction (we get a first hint of this at 2:27), as if sealing the evergreen dispute between the attempt at elevation and earthly constraints.

As for the rest, Youngs's "meditative" theorem admits no variables whatsoever.

The beauty of it is that, in "The Graze Of Days" as throughout "Sapphie", the use of repetition implies an apparent reinvention of the material, an endless rediscovery of ever-“new” perspectives. It brings to mind the conceptual undertone of Gregorian chants (another source of inspiration Youngs has openly acknowledged), in which every repetition was perceived as a rebirth, an immanent novelty. At this point it's easy to revive the notion of (secular) religiosity already glimpsed in the subtle “Wyatt-esque” echoes, in the sense of disillusionment stemming from a “failed contact” (the man who believes he's speaking to a cosmos that only pretends to listen). And yet, faced with these clumsy attempts to dig up hidden meanings, what still surprises is the author's reserved attitude and his tendency to downplay things, especially when asked about the length of his compositions: “In the end it came down to finding room for all the lyrics depending on my mood at the time. Had I recorded it on a different day, maybe I would have sung faster and the songs would have wrapped up sooner, or maybe I would have sung more slowly and made them last a lot longer.”

May time always keep him just like this, good old Richard: humble, passionate, yet endowed with that healthy dose of detachment that lets him laugh at his own art. A good person, all things considered (or at least, that's how I like to imagine him). Because yes, the myth of the artist as an arrogant, lying rebel does have a grain of truth to it, and above all a certain charm of its own. But every now and then, it's reassuring to see genius and level-headedness walk hand in hand.

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11/07/2010