Richard Youngs – Airs of the Ear

For everyone who has ever picked up an instrument, not knowing exactly how to play but willing to wander up and down its melodic scales out of curiosity, you know that if you take enough time you will likely find a melody that seems to have been pulled straight out or your subconscious, the nature of its particular meter or lilt innate to your idea of what music should sound like. You’ll repeat that melodic phrase over and over, its few notes burrowing into mind as you trace its tonal steps through their perfect trajectory, convincing you that you’ve stumbled upon what might be the perfect melodic progression. Even if it is fairly simple and repetitive, it seems so right that you have to play it until you restore some unseen and vaguely understood balance that is dependent upon your repeating that series of notes. For over 10 years now, Richard Youngs has been finding those kinds of melodies, building entire albums out of the repetition of a few hypnotic melodic cadences and making them so intuitively appealing that they feel like they’ve been buried in your DNA. Somehow, he seems to have gained ownership of the rudimentary melodies that comprise the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon musical tradition.
Constructed around only five tracks, Airs of the Ear is saturated with more of Youngs’ meditative magic, opening with the richly cascading 12-string guitar notes of “Life on the Stream,” its piercing notes ringing out at the end of each measure. Displaying an aesthetic constantly caught in the push and pull between the modern and the medieval, electronic drones provide the sonic underpinning for the flowing guitar lines, evoking a barely remembered ancient past. As always, English folk music is as much of a jumping-off point as is experimental music, as Youngs guitar fingerwork is fluid and haunting, firmly rooted in the folk tradition, matched by a clear and strong voice that evokes a pure and honest pastoral existence. Yet his delicacy is most always augmented by dissonance, squeals of electronic feedback, and spaceship sounds interrupt the ethereal peace of “Oh My Stars.”
Still, the balance is impeccably maintained, the rising wave of electric guitar, banjo, and rumbling bass forming a dark sonic undertow in “Fire Horse Rising,” colliding with and overwhelming the acoustic guitar lines that open the piece. “I don’t understand, and I don’t want to know” forms the central lyrical phrase which, like his reliance on a single well-placed melodic line, is all that is required to form the template to expand outward into open-ended compositional space. With a square wave (whatever that is) howling like a homesick coyote, Youngs’ multi-tracked harmonies add a particularly stark weight to the Anglicized “Halifax Amore,” a song that lands squarely on the careful balance between the organically homespun and the coldly experimental that he pursues throughout the disc by simply tracing and retracing its most winning elements in a number of textural shades.
Even so, to call Youngs a minimalist would seem to be disingenuous and misleading. A lot is concentrated and focused on those foundational elements, giving them a deeper resonance than if he had decided to write songs with choruses or multiple stanzas. Every note, every word has to convey more, has to bare a higher ratio of the compositional burden. As five minutes stretch into 10, and 10 into 15, Youngs’ true gift reveals itself in the closing “Machaut’s Dream,” as his guitar lines cycle around and around each other, changing little in each of their revolutions around their central point. With just a little watery manipulation of his 12-string guitar lines and eerie theremin (is there any other kind?) added to the elemental arrangement, Youngs is a paradoxical marriage of the simple and the complex, using an economy of notes and a smattering of effects to evoke intuitively felt memories and places never visited.
The scenario previously described probably requires a somewhat naïve mindset, one that is willing to follow its muse to whatever ends it naturally leads, picking melody and hypnotic repetition over the allure of technique and vitriol to push the listener to evident conclusions. Youngs, however, is anything but naïve. His tendencies toward reductionism aside, his take on minimalism is sophisticated and deliberate, allowing him to indulge in excesses that never grow tiresome and reach entirely unique conceptual territory without being heavy-handed. And, somehow, he ends up playing the melodies that have been lying barely submerged in your subconscious, waiting to be freed when you to pick up a guitar or trace a melody with one finger on the piano.