blue thirty-nine: Richard Youngs
Richard Youngs is one of my all-time favourite musicians. This release is special to me not only for fanboy reasons, but also because it formed part of a brace of contemporaneous releases on Blue Tapes from artists across Northern Britain that featured a resolutely lo-fi approach.
Along with blue thirty-nine, these releases by Bulbils, The All Golden and Ashtray Navigations, made the case for an intimate but eccentric form of home-brewed pop.
In Richard's case, this involved a quartet of playful, weirdly absorbing songs constructed out of tape loops of baritone acoustic guitar and wordless vocals.
Tape loops are often synonymous in marginal music with a crackly, droney take on ambient. This isn't that. A lot of it is unexpectedly jaunty - and for once I don't mean that in a bad way.
It is compulsive, intensely satisfying listening from a restlessly inventive musical soul. Not only does it not really sound like anything else in Richard Youngs' mighty catalogue, it doesn't sound like anything else.