Richard Youngs: Under Stellar Stream

I could just knuckle down: tell you how little I know about Youngs and the massive discography that he has issued from his adopted home of Glasgow since moving there in the early nineties. Attempt to describe the slow cold orbit of sounds that revolve around the man’s voice, which occupies the space between a plea and a command - the warmth being in the breath - put something between a six and an eight in the little firing squad stars down below, and go do something else.

But this is strange music, stranger yet thanks to an extended listen to recent David Sylvian prior to listening to Under Stellar Stream for the first time; causing the two to blur, together dragging all manner of wilderness into my room before the sun has cleared the hill. Spiderwebs, dusty mirrors, dew weighing heavy on the mind.

Being two thirds of the way through this epic invocation, which I imagine continues through the last two of the six tracks, I am enmeshed and captivated by the stark sounds and stark, unflinching sincerity in Youngs’ piercingly ancient vocals. Not piercing in the shrill sense, they literally pierce the fleshy dam of what feels like a reservoir of ancient experience, entangled and forever bonded to emotion; it is flooding out and filling my body and mind.

But before this experience took shape I underwent a palpable grappling with the music. I imagined many of the friends for whom I have a great respect, and I imagined their dismissal of this music, their inherent distaste for the gloom and the introspective, arcane lyricism. I struggled with my empathy for their perspective and the wisdom in it, and an inner sense that if I could exert enough effort to steer myself away from indulging in the bleakness, that I could recover something beautiful.

Under Stellar Stream has been that powerful for me, and although I don’t want it to end, being now in its final two minutes, it has been too powerful a thing this morning for me to repeat it. In that sense it reminds me of certain passages of Mount Eerie’s most recent record, Winds Poem, which I reviewed here.

Now that it has ended I remember it as a colossal hymn which evoked the immensity of being; it resonates particularly with my time spent on moorland and the coast in winter and in that sense it feels particularly British. Cyclical piano, a sadness so heavy that it’s gravity could crush. If anyone could be said to have translated William Basinski’s music into the songwriter’s form it is Youngs on this recording.

As such it’s a hard one to recommend, a shockingly real experience which exhibited none of the avant-detritus that I feared it would scatter.