Five years after releasing Twelve of Hearts, Daniel O’Sullivan reconvenes with Richard Youngs for another intense minimalist meditation.
On their debut collaborative album, Youngs and O’Sullivan used a single chord progression to distill various pop idioms into twelve succinct tracks. And they try something completely different on Persian Carpets, a blissful, longform experiment that’ll be more familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with Youngs’ Black Truffle sides. Youngs plays zither here, following O’Sullivan’s trance-inducing piano repetitions that recall his collaborations with the great Charlemagne Palestine. But it’s not only repetition that drives ‘Persian Carpets I’. O’Sullivan varies his phrases by altering the dynamics as he plays, creating waves of noise…
Tag Archive: Richard Youngs
The inimitable Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with this third full-length for the label, Hidden. Like CXXI and Modern Sorrow, Hidden unfolds across two side-long pieces at once eminently listenable and possessed of the ‘bloody-minded’ dedication to ‘having an idea and sticking with it’ that Youngs himself has identified as one of the key qualities of his work.
At the core of both pieces are rapid, randomised arpeggios generated with a Moog Grandmother, hypnotic patterns that wouldn’t be out of place on a Berlin School classic. Alongside these arpeggios, across the seventeen minutes of the first side-long piece Youngs builds an airy structure of shakers, synthetic handclaps and a brief, repeated sample, impossible to identify but…