Richard Youngs / Tom James Scott – Balfron Tower Community Cabin, London, 1/16/15

I’ll admit to some forced unfamiliarity with Richard Youngs’ work the past 20 years, having ingested some of his work with A Band and Simon Wickham-Smith in the nineties, long before I was ready. In point of fact, perhaps I never shall be ready for the atonal and daffy 90s work I last heard then. Therefore, any encounter with his name has been an excuse to skim past and continue reading, much as I do with celeb gossip and NFL scores. No longer. I was in London for work, and reckoned taking the pulse of the city was best served by stumbling through an arduous set of tube rides and a long, confused walk through halal meat shops & pious Muslims clad in burkas and shawls, smack into a public housing project’s tiny community center (!) for the first of three shows that Youngs would be performing this weekend called “The Tower Hamlets Trilogy”.

I’m not kidding – this was the sort of room in which a housing complex might hold a tiny preschool, or bring out a slide projector on Friday nights, yet for this evening it beat any club, hands-down. First the 25 or so of us who’d assembled on time had to make it through Tom James Scott, a young British minimalist who was by turns bewitching and absurd. His forty minutes sitting at a small folding table consisted mainly of him playing tapes, sometimes with zero instrumental accompaniment, just him sitting and listening to music (I presume) he’d already made. Or he’d strike some bells at a molasses-like tempo for a bit, and I think he rubbed some tiny cymbals together for about five minutes once. And yet! There was one section that took up about a quarter of his allotted time in which he randomly plucked guitar in the minimal “fashion” to some ghostly piano music, while a woman sitting across from him slowly manipulated some chiming instrument I couldn’t really see. I was transfixed, transported: all things good. The net effect was pretty silly on the whole, but an intellectually-stunted curmudgeon like me would say something like that.

Youngs, on the other hand, was fantastic. After a lovely, straightforwardly plaintive acoustic guitar & voice piece called “Arise”, he warned the crowd that tonight was going to be about “songs”, that it wouldn’t be “weird”, and that it was OK to leave if that was a problem, as his other two shows this weekend would be “solo voice” and “voice and zither”, respectively. Whew. Talk about easing an apostate gently back into the Youngs fold. And he delivered a terrific, cracked set of acoustic folk music, in which tunings were sometimes deliberately off, but only just so, and in which his emotive voice carried his pieces along beautifully. There was a nearly 12-minute piece called “Spin Me Endless In Thy Universe” which was sublime. Alas, the spell Youngs was weaving was broken in a most jarring fashion at the end of the show, when a shouted FUCK OFF! bellowed from a young urchin seated on the floor, scaring the bejeesus out of the musically narcotized crowd; the unhinged in question then helpfully added, “You’re a fucking cunt” before storming out. Youngs retorted, “Well, that’s as good a place as any to stop now, isn’t it”; everyone had a nervous laff, and we were done. Excellent and relatively non-traditional night out in the mother country.