Richard Youngs' May
About a decade ago, I read a review in a fanzine about a strange LP called Lake by a British avant-garde duo that identified itself only as R!!!S!!!. The review gave an address, located in the UK, and when I wrote to the mysterious perpetrators I received a very cordial reply from one Richard Youngs, as well as a complimentary copy of the album, which turned out to be a two-record set and arrived in a plain white cover with the word lake emblazoned on it. That was the sum of graphic presentation or, for that matter, any kind of discernible "credits."
These guys were obviously not rabid spotlight-seekers, and the music contained on the two LPs was stark and understated, much like the work of such legendary Brit "experimental" collectives as the Music Improvisation Company and the AMM, or the collaborations of John Cale and Terry Riley in the early 70s. Perhaps the most amazing track was the 12-minute "Goat," a masterpiece of droning hover-sprawl with ominous funereal undertones. In light of the Philip Glass school of "ambient" pussy-willow rustlings that had dominated the so-called "avant-garde" for so long, it was refreshing to hear such legitimately whacko renderings again.
It's somewhat heartening to see that Youngs is still pursuing his private crusade of humble madness. He's been especially prolific of late, having recently collaborated with Makoto Kawabata, the UFO-attuned avatar of Japan's most fractured cosmos-seeking communal entities, Acid Mothers Temple. The resulting self-titled album, in its iridescent demon-chant dementia, was the musical equivalent of having one's frontal lobes pierced by a dozen well-honed toothpicks. Now there's May, which is Youngs as naked as you'd ever want him, plinking on an acoustic guitar in his solitary environs without so much as a Jew's harp or bazooki to raise a din. This album is so goddamn stark and English-sounding it evokes Arthurian scenarios?I could almost see this guy as the court fool plunking the second track of this LP, "Bloom of All," for the satisfaction of his liege. And subsequently being thrown out.
But the fool who laughs last laughs best, as the next track proves: "Trees that Fall," which is almost mystical in its haunting simplicity, by far the best piece of folk music since the totally fucking great PG Six album, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites, last year. Just like that album's tingling psychedelic presence, this track is a gloriously warped and beautiful treasure. The ripples of acoustic wrangling are downright smoky in that subtle Neil Young manner, but the picking is more intense a la John Fahey or Richard Thompson. Dick's voice is ghostly pure and undiluted as he trills verses like "It's in your smile/It's in your sleep/It's to the hills/It's for the birds/You dream at dawn of trees that fall/I think you'll find/It's in your mind."
Youngs' voice, a reedy instrument not that dissimilar from John Entwistle's, is the perfect vehicle for these wistfully otherworldly tunes. "Wynding Hills of Maine," as its title suggests, presents ever-escalating spires of guitar and voice to evoke pastoral settings from places and times too distant even to conjure in the current bleak world atmosphere. Luckily, Youngs has never let the dull face of "reality" blur his utterly unique vision. "Gilding" is like a lullaby best suited for an intoxicated pre-dawn dream-state; and "Wynd Time Wynd" is almost hymnal in its simplicity as Youngs ponders the inevitability of time itself ("you're winding all the time" he sings in his typically plaintive timbre).
Some records club you over the head whether you want them to or not, and others just kind of sit there and do nothing, but May is like a wood fire on a winter night that flickers radiantly in the background, hemmed in by its obvious and necessary boundaries, but still making its warming presence known.