Richard Youngs is a forty year old librarian, transplanted from a childhood in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire to Glasgow, from where he maintains musical connections with an international network of similarly independent, but musically disparate, cult figures. The first Richard Youngs album I ever heard was Making Paper. It was released in February 2001 on the reliable American label Jagjaguwar, sixteen years into Youngs’ recording career. Improvised directly to mini-disc in Edinburgh the previous year, with lyrics that occurred to Youngs as he played, Making Paper featured two twenty minute pieces and one three minute one, all built solely on nothing more than a keening, high-lonesome vocal and some simple, stately, repetitive, resolutely minimal piano figures, with occasional jarring bum notes and lengthy silences. But it was May, Youngs’ next solo release, featuring just acoustic guitar and vocals, that hit that wonderful mid-space where great art somehow becomes accessible without losing any of the edge that makes it great.

May was released in 2002, but Youngs had recorded another album on acoustic guitar five years previously. 1997’s Sapphie, named for a friend’s dead Alsatian dog, pasted the same kind of minimalist aesthetic found on Making Paper over folksy textures, but when Youngs returned to the acoustic for May it was for six shorter pieces. The tracks were all laid down live, and the words were all drawn from a single thirty verse lyric Young wrote in an evening. The sleeve tells us May was “recorded Christmas 2000, Easter 2001 and last day of May 2001 in Harpenden, England”, but these significant sounding dates, with connotations of spiritual death and rebirth, merely represent times when Youngs went home to visit his father. “I recorded May at my Dad’s house on an old reel-to-reel over about half a year, doing a little each time I visited.”

On May, Youngs left the distorted Casio keyboards and sheet-metal guitar of many of his previous thirty or so releases in Glasgow and disguised himself as a troubadour, with years of avant-garde experimentation at his back to inform his every, apparently straightforward gesture. Nowadays there’d be an easier route to reviewing or marketing May. You’d call it acid-folk, or avant-folk, and drop the appropriate names, but unlike much of the contemporary music that gets scooped up under those unwieldy banner headings, May is genuinely psychedelic, avant-garde and traditional, and does not require the performer involved to dress as a mediaeval clown. But it’s difficult to know if Youngs arrived at May’s distinctive sound accidentally, or by design.

Youngs’ first release under his own name, the extremely limited 1988 solo album Advent, for example, seemed derived from the kind of droning, 1960’s minimalism defined by Tony Conrad and The Dream Syndicate group. But recording at home between terms of his Nottingham University Maths course, Youngs had arrived at the sound in isolation, unaware of its precedents. “I knew about minimalism, but I’d only heard rather slick versions of it. I wasn’t up on the more rough and ready stuff.”, he confesses. Youngs describes his work as if it’s automatic, almost unconsidered, and the title of his most recent solo album, 2005’s The Naïve Shaman, could almost be a self-conscious in-joke, but the traditional textures of May represented a more knowing appropriation of existing styles. “In the 80s I used to play at folk clubs simply because you didn’t have to submit demo tapes or pass auditions,” Youngs recalls, “The open floor policy suited me. I wasn’t playing folk music. But I do have a soft spot for those recordings of (traditional unaccompanied singers) like Walter Pardon and Harry Cox, and an endless amazement at the guitar style of Martin Carthy.”

Youngs’ admiration for Carthy is cautiously evident throughout May. The grand old duke of English folk holds steadfastly to the central figures of old folk tunes, relying on variations in tone and texture, rather than through on demonstrations of musicianly dexterity. Likewise, throughout May, Youngs’ guitar playing boldly resists elaboration, so that when there is a brief moment of extemporisation around the central tune of Wynd Time Wynd, it has an incredible impact. But Youngs denies there’s a process at work. “Playing like that feels pretty natural to me. I think I’m just not a very elaborate guitarist.” The uncompromising avoidance of any vocal inflection during Bloom Of All, which reflects the great folk singer Shirley Collins’ technique of allowing songs to speak for themselves unembellished, was “nothing deliberate – I just had a tune and I stuck with it.” And when the treble strings on Gilding resonate for unnaturally long periods, as if they’ve been extended somehow beyond their natural lifespan, Youngs says, “I probably mis-set the compression on the pre-amp.” Even the brilliant sequencing of the album, from Neon Winter’s almost impassable opening salvo of one string guitar part and baleful vocal, to the closing ballad Wynd Time Wynd, which sounds like something off Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left stripped of any orchestration, seems all but accidental. “A few people have told me that they skip Neon Winter when they listen to May,” Youngs muses, unconcerned. “I think the album gets easier to listen to with each track.”

May stands at the apex of a superb sequence of solo albums from 1997’s Sapphie onwards, via Making Paper and May, to the recent trio of Airs Of The Ear, River Through Howling Sky, and The Naïve Shaman. These two final releases throb with the experimental electronics and fuzzy feedback familiar from Youngs’ more uncompromising work, but never lose sight of the beating, human heart he finally found the confidence to foreground on May. No-one else comes close to achieving this fusion of folk music’s sensibilities and avant-garde music’s strategies. Richard Youngs is the British underground’s last great unknown.