Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is a Glasgow-based musician, composer, songwriter, and improviser.

After nearly four decades of uninterrupted activity, Youngs’ work—like few others in contemporary music—radiates the simple joy of exploration and experimentation.

As all Youngs fans know, one of the great pleasures of following his career lies in the difficulty of predicting what his next release in an inexhaustible series of albums will bring: unaccompanied voice? Country songs? Minimalist music? Contemporary pop productions? Shakuhachi? Guitar pieces played with his feet? A ripping fuzz bass over hyper-fast, distorted drum-machine beats?

Continuing Youngs’ great tradition of exploring new techniques, instruments, and approaches while bringing his unique touch to them, his latest album on Black Truffle is an assemblage of Moog, hypnotic patterns, voice, samples, and synthetic claps forming airy structures halfway between minimalism, pop, dub, and hip hop.

Youngs seeks, as he himself puts it, to “be above all himself.” He rarely appears on stage, and it will be hard to predict exactly what form the concert planned for March 10 at Le Périscope will take—except that Youngs will at the very least use piano, guitar, percussion, of course his voice, and anything else we might be willing to provide him.