Richard Youngs - Hidden

Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with Hidden, his third full-length for the label. True to his long-held approach of committing fully to a single idea, the album unfolds across two side-long pieces built around rapid, randomised arpeggios from a Moog Grandmother. These spiralling patterns hint at Berlin School electronics but are shaped into something unmistakably Youngs.

The first piece layers shakers, synthetic handclaps and a looping, foghorn-like fragment around those arpeggios. Youngs’ voice drifts across the mix, repeating clipped syllables with a wandering delay, creating a strangely intimate call-and-response. Sparse placement of each element gives the music an airy sense of space, echoing the openness found in his collaborations and early solo work.

The second piece revisits the arpeggiated core but shifts its surroundings: filtered guitar chords, long flute tones, bright handclaps and brief vocal cut-ins that flicker like stray radio signals. It hints at rhythmic lift-off before dissolving back into a weightless shimmer. The paired structures echo Youngs’ longstanding fascination with theme-and-variation, recalling the foundations of his classic Advent, while also nodding towards the exploratory spirit of Moebius & Plank or Holger Czukay.