One of the strangest things about Richard Youngs is how acutely his records catch the world’s shifting hues and textures, how they snapshot moments in seasonal mutability: Atlas of Hearts seems a perfect encapsulation of that stretch of English weather from the exquisite stasis of midwinter to the moment when the sun floods dry mornings, talking about a spring we won’t see for some time. (Not the current moment, when the climate’s main feature is its indescribability: grey, shapeless, seemingly neverending.) His best work completes one of the most important functions of art: to articulate the world, to make visible a nature we would otherwise miss – that, indeed, only comes into focus through human intervention and observation. It’s not coincidental (noting, of course, his inheritance from the electric/acid folk crowd of the 60s) that his most electronic recordings – The Naïve Shaman’s digital incantations, the wide-screen noise of Advent and Ceaucescu with Simon Wickham-Smith, the guitar-drift of River Through Howling Sky and his collaborative album with Makoto Kawabata – seem to summon metaphors from nature (the fractal sprawl of lichen and moss, the density of undergrowth, lustre of chlorophyll or glisten of a blackbird’s wing), that seem to get closest to the visionary access of Blake, Coppe, Jarman etc.

Alongside the heavily electrified songs, of course, Youngs has kept up a steady exploration of folk praxis, reaching (for me, anyway) its plateau in the steely longing of May and Sapphie. Atlas of Hearts represents the fullest fruits of the coming-together of those two strands: his noisiest folk record and folkiest noise record. It furthers the abstraction of folk-song explored in his version of ‘God Bless the Master’ with Alex Neilson (from Ourselves) and Autumn Response‘s multitrack reveries. This is most audible on each side’s central track: in ‘The Glade and Clean Shade’ a central guitar figure, doubled so it echoes back on itself at unexpected angles, is ghosted by Youngs’ vocal repeating a central refrain, interjecting, entering, momentarily, into off-chorus harmonies with itself, playing with levels of clarity and FX, punctured by a burst of guitar noise in its dying seconds; ‘Heart in Open Space’ swims with blue-green clamour around the central calm of Youngs’ languid picking and dub-abstracted vocal. Youngs inverts the normalising focus, in writing on folk-song, on narrative, the form’s simplicity and alleged universality, zeroing in on its purely sonic properties: the strangeness of the English folk vocal style as heard on field recordings and folk-revival records, the oddities and multiple resonances of the songs’ structures, the peculiar pleasure of steely guitar sounds; here Song is now an interplay of abstracted planes of sound, shades of timbre, movements of voice, kaleidoscopic fields of noises seduced and seducing by their own slippery powers.

The power of Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits, the record that gained Youngs his greatest recent acclaim, lay in its capturing of pop’s mechanisms of affect, its idiosyncracies, the way a song’s puncta will catch you, always already unawares (every time). That’s not how these songs work: their pleasures are closer to those of experimental and minimalist composition/improv, catching you on the fascinations of watching their unfolding logic, revelling in their shifting textures/structures, their tensions constantly pulling between abstraction and lyrical figuration. Youngs’ vocal style, which never seems to change from record to record (and why on earth would you want it to?), gives us the strongest sense of this: his copper-tawny voice cycles through a small series of refrains whose imagery and sound overlap like Venn diagram circles, placing each time a different emphasis, mutating them like a jazz soloist working over again the same set of changes. Even on the more conventional 1-and-a-half-minute fragment ‘Sussex Pond’, his circling around the title phrase evokes a vivid sense of fear and longing. On ‘Haze II’, the record’s closer, the bluesy, drifting riff and narcoleptic vocal of opener ‘Haze I’ are reprised and clouded over with extra smears of choral noise, counterpointed guitar and keening voices that complicate the scene, swimming into view and catching the attention repeatedly, like the flight of birds across the field of vision.

Atlas of Hearts is testament to what I still find so wonderful about Youngs: the inexhaustibility of his imaginative capacities and his unwearying relation to the world (which Coleridge claimed the generative faculty of imagination mediated), his apparently total inability, despite his prodigious output, to slip up and make a bad record (or a soul-sick one, which can amount to the same thing). His work bears the mark, if nothing else, of having absolutely done right by the creative process: you can feel the human imagination pivot and play in all his work, which consequently flows not only with joy but everything else genuine that it lies in our capacity to feel; he does what so few artists can do at this juncture: he completes the labour of letting the world in. Even if just for that, he remains an inspiration and undying pleasure. But it isn’t just for that, of course: Atlas of Hearts is as lovely and captivating a record as you might find all year.

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