Browse by Artist: YOUNGS, RICHARD

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	171 Used Train Tickets
Label:	FUSETRON
Format:	10"
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	FUSE 029EP

"The Old Angel, Nottingham, 1990. It was the A-Band's third live show and we were calling ourselves Advent for the evening in honour of a local record shop who -- judging by their filing system -- thought they were stocking an album entitled 'Richard Youngs' by Advent rather than Advent by Richard Youngs. For reasons that escape me now, I'd hoarded 171 used train tickets. It felt like a cool idea to read them out. So I did. Not in the privacy of my own home, but to an audience. They seemed to enjoy it. As soon as I'd finished, the A-Band struck up and a good time was had by all." -- Richard Youngs.

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Sapphie
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	JAG 019CD

"Originally issued in 1998 by Oblique recordings, Sapphie was Richard Youngs' fifth solo full-length and quite a unique album in his already unique oeuvre. Made up of three acoustic tracks -- spanning over 37 minutes in length -- featuring just classical guitar and voice, Sapphie is quiet and introspective. The songs feel like an intimate journey by hand through a song cycle of loss and renewal. Within the context of his massive and ever-growing body of work, Sapphie is his most song-based and arguably his most personal. Fans of reclusive sages like Nick Drake, Anne Briggs, and Robert Wyatt will most appreciate the timeless quality inherent in Youngs' songs."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Sapphie
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	LP
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	JAG 019LP

"Now available for the first time as a vinyl LP. Originally issued as CD in 1998 by Oblique Recordings, Sapphie was Richard Youngs' fifth solo full-length and quite a unique album in his already unique oeurve. Made up of three acoustic tracks -- spanning over 37 minutes in length -- featuring just classical guitar and voice, Sapphie is quiet and introspective. The songs feel like an intimate journey by hand through a song cycle of loss and renewal. Within the context of his massive and ever-growing body of work, Sapphie is his most song-based and arguably his most personal. Fans of reclusive sages like Nick Drake, Anne Briggs and Robert Wyatt will most appreciate the timeless quality inherent in Youngs' songs."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Making Paper
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	JAG 026CD

"Richard Youngs' first three-song 'full-length' release shone down like a beacon from above. It opened with a chorus of tape hiss and a patently English-sounding piano. Eventually there was a British man pleading in song for mercy, for pardon, or, at the very least, for conviction to a lesser charge. This was Advent and it was 1990. Youngs had just introduced himself to the universe at large through his No Fans label. Fast forward to the New Year, 2000. Youngs is back on the stool, this time in Edinburgh, Scotland, with long-time collaborator Brian Lavelle engineering. Youngs has another three songs in him, and they show him to be a much wizened, more patient man. Distilled to only piano and vocals, the album is epic to say the least. Opening with 'Warriors', a 19-minute journey the size of Scotland, the song pleads, 'Warriors see through battle lines.' The second song, 'The World Is Silence In Your Head', is vintage Youngs fare, offering further evidence that there is significant kinship between him and the ranks of the late-60's to early-70's progressive rock set such as Peter Hammill and his Van Der Graaf Generator, as well as first wave Yes and King Crimson. The song is as sprawling and imaginative in its mythology as the most inspired of prog's deep canon ever got. Yet it tells the tale in less than three minutes and with only one phrase and one instrument, with unprecedented clarity and precision-not to mention poesy. Certainly it warrants that Youngs be crowned the king of the progressive minimalists. He preys on the most meditative tendencies in each of us, and he finds the essence in each of his songs (throwing out the rest) which endeavours to put erstwhile listeners in a trance-like state."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	May
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	JAG 043CD

"May, recorded at various times in Harpenden, England, is Richard Youngs' newest solo meditation. His music is magical, but not in the sense that it merely conjures up fantastical imagery or 'transports the listener to another place'. None of that is really happening. Richard Youngs' spell lies in the transformative qualities of his music. From so little we get so much. It is minimalism without pretense, songwriting that abhors artifice. It resides in the spiritual nexus between the oft disparate realms of traditional folk and the avant-garde. Following in the same spirit of his more celebrated solo works, Advent (1990), Sapphie (1998) and Making Paper (2001), May is, like Sapphie, just acoustic guitar and Richard Youngs' voice. Like the others it has an unmistakable 'drone-like' quality that has, over time, become one of Youngs' trademarks. But what sets May apart is that it is almost a conventional record; six songs, just over 36 minutes, no song over 8 minutes. If you listen carefully enough to the plaintive, stripped-down and gentle rumbling of the songs on May (and squint hard enough), you can almost discern a semblance of verse-chorus-verse structure. And, for sure, May derives much of its glory from the traditional and the hymnal. If there is a 'psych' or 'trance-like' quality to Youngs' music, it is charged only by internal endorphins, nature's most underrated drug-mechanism at work. Richard Youngs treats his body of work very much like his own body. He is very careful with what he lets in."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Airs Of The Ear
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	JAG 059CD

"Richard Youngs' impressive body of work continues to mount. It resembles, unwittingly for sure, a slow zig zag march towards some Hegelian musical ideal in the distant horizon. Youngs, the leading wizard of droney and minimal psychedelic folk, has unleashed Airs of the Ear, his new opus invoking new magic looking for new ears to ensnare. Building on his esteemed recordings Advent (1990), Sapphie (1998), Making Paper (2001) and May (2002), Airs of the Ear goes beyond merely residing in what is the essential ecology of Richard Youngs -- the spiritual nexus between the oft disparate realms of traditional folk and the avant-garde; it now embodies this ecology. Acoustic instruments coexist perfectly with electric ones, while neither class of instrumentation is ever trumped by the other contraptions on the record, namely ring modulation, the square wave or the theremin. Perfect balance is almost achieved. There is harmony, true emotional resonance, even on what is Youngs' most captivating work on the record, 'Fire Horse Rising'. Despite the ever-escalating nature of this song, where Youngs powerfully and repeatedly invokes '...and I don't understand, ...and I don't want to know...', the listener is never allowed to feel overwhelmed or be pushed out of that special meditative and trance-like space. The spell is never broken."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Advent
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	JAG 062CD

Listed as #11 on Alan Lichts' "Minimal Top Ten". "Jagjaguwar is excited to reissue Richard Youngs' Advent, Youngs' very first record originally released in 1990 in the vinyl format on Youngs' own No Fans label. Only 300 LPs were released initially. It was then later released on the Table Of The Elements label and quickly went out of print. It became a true underground success story, a critical darling, with Alan Licht, for example, putting it on his 'Minimal Top Ten list' in the publication Halana Simply put, it is an essential work in the body of work of one of the most important modern day progressive minimalists. Includes a new essay by Richard Youngs. 'A three-part composition for piano, voice, and ultra-nasty oboe and electric guitar, Advent indicated signs of life in a genre long dormant in the 80s 'experimental' scene. It continues the tradition from [Terry Riley's] Reed Streams on down with gusto.' -- Alan Licht's 'Minimal Top Ten List', Halana.

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Advent
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	LP
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	JAG 062LP

"Originally released in 1990 in the vinyl format on Youngs' own No Fans label, this title has been reissued numerous times in the CD format (most recently by Jagjaguwar). Jagjaguwar is now proud to reissue this very important work on vinyl as well. Advent became a true underground success story, a critical darling, with Alan Licht, for example, putting it on his 'minimal top ten list' in the publication Halana. 'It is a record by an intense young man,' writes Richard Youngs, in an essay packaged with the record." Kinda amazing to have this record back on vinyl, in the year 2006. Originally recorded in 1988, it features Richard on electric guitar, piano, oboes and vocals. When first released, it came out of nowhere more than just about any record you could name. In a world swimming in wrongs, everything about this LP is just perfectly right.

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	River Through Howling Sky
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	JAG 068CD

"If the 'musical' real number line is infinitely dense, then the most recent work of Richard Youngs endeavors to fill in all of the holes on it. River Through Howling Sky is Youngs' latest full-length. It returns to the more meditative and drone-y side of his songcraft (circa Sapphie (1998) and Making Paper (2001)), although this is no true devolution: all of his recordings to date have some measure of these qualities. So what is it that sets River Through Howling Sky apart from its predecessors? It is the density on the recording, both intra-spatial and otherworldly. The howling guitar that points unerringly to some imagined horizon line. Throughout, Youngs is the calm and steady wolf, chanting odes to infinity. Expose the ancient Brotherhood of Pythagoras to River Through Howling Sky, and you would find knowing nods, pursed lips, and secret incantations in caves. An unwitting acceptance that not everything is rational or conceptually circumnavigable. Our western tonal system relies on ratios, i.e. strings whacked at particular intervals. Young's howling guitar and circular chants -- with the help of a spartan amount of percussion and electronics -- may just encompass all the possible ratios and, mystically, more."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Autumn Response
Label:	JAGJAGUWAR
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	JAG 121CD

"A spartan folk-'pop' record filled with tinder-box intimacies, composed of some of the shortest songs ever recorded by Richard Youngs. The simplest form of trickery comes from Richard Youngs' restrained use of an acoustic guitar, bringing it back to Youngs' basics. Twenty-six seconds into 'I Need The Light,' the first track off the album, the listener is confronted with the pivotal element of the record, the drawing line between the hardcore Youngs purists and fairweather fans: the track, like others on the record, features Youngs' double-tracked voice splitting in two -- as one overlaid performance veers away from the other. This gesture warrants such a title 'King of the Progressive Minimalists' -- which is often used beside his name by critics -- as the confident inclusion of such an effect grants it legitimacy. Youngs' voices slipping away from one another is on par with other intense representations of singularity such as Donald Judd and Malevich's Suprematicist Composition: White on White. Pop is a gesture, a stance, a pose. Autumn Response is a singer-songwriter album, as Youngs' fingers slip over the steel strings with little feet and whispery toes, his gently prophetic songs evoke Roger Waters and the folk phase play is sure to appeal to fans of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs."

Artist:	YOUNGS, RICHARD
Title:	Festival
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	TOE 021CD

"In this, his first solo CD, he fuses disparate instrumentation (homemade electronics, plaintive vocals, clock chimes and found objects) into a lengthy series of pealing, minimal compositions that owe more to the slowly evolving drones and repetitive themes of Advent than any of his subsequent works. Dense electronic squalls are juxtaposed against shimmering percussion, culminating in the marvelously hypnotic 20 minute finale, 'The Sea Is Madness.' "

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