Tinkering, testing, tuning and transforming, Yara Asmar is a restlessly inquisitive multi-instrumentalist. Since her debut release on Hive Mind, ‘Home Recordings 2018-2021’ the Beirut- based musician has used music boxes and metallophones, accordion and toy pianos to sculpt her sonic narrative. It’s not Art Ensemble avant or Cage-ist experimentalism powering her practice though, the pull of miniature instrumentation comes from an emotional connection to innocence and simplicity, memories and feelings.
Woven through her last two albums ‘synth waltzes and accordion laments’ from ’23 and last year’s ‘Stuttering Music’, Asmar’s grandmother’s Hohner accordion has been a pivot for her poignant music. Now, with her new album for Hive Mind, ‘everyone I love is sleeping and i love them so so much’, there are murmurings of a gentle shift. Living between small-town Alfred in New York State and Beirut has carried Asmar’s attention away from the nostalgic to capture more of the present within her beguiling music.
early on to die on any hill (if it’s easy enough to climb) signals these more expansive imaginings at work. Here is a piece that’s symphonic and dark, where soaring dreamwave chords glide over a terrain and crashing sounds emerge from deep caverns. The cut has that Room40/Lea Bertucci dramatic edge oozing through it. The improvisational and filmic wooden giants and mechanical birds continues to highlight the album’s broadening scope. Usually a contented solo composer and performer, on this track Asmar teams up with Brooklyn bassist John Murchison and sax player Gideon Forbes. Active in the New York jazz and Arabic music scenes, Murchison and Forbes subtly add dynamic imagery to this tune as it swoops and scurries with gentle intent. Asmar’s chiming and sighing metallophone, the prowling bass line and exotic sax calls engage in a tender jostle between the strident and the fragile. The piece sparkles with future possibilities.
As we know from Asmar’s previous work, she is a musician who explores any instrument with a creative zeal. On ‘everyone I love is sleeping and i love them so so much’, alongside the tuned percussive ring of the metallophone, she has delved deeper into the disc playing symphonion music box. It’s an instrument which suits her fascination with tone, pattern, and melody while enabling her experimental zest to filter through. The titles of some of the symphonion-based pieces here, like you saw what you were looking at and you touched what you were touching or there are glorious labyrinths in the ground for those with the claws to find them, show a quirky humour which underplays the unblemished beauty that Asmar conjures from these creaking, deconstructed “toys”.
Perhaps the album’s lead track is the most fully realised of such instrumental excavations. everyone i love is sleeping and i love them so so much begins on a homely melodious cycle, then with tense pauses and tone shifting layers, scales further into your imagination. Quivering waves of sound, distant tingles and the frazzled edges of distortion build an atmosphere charged with longing. Asmar recalls that one of her confidants during the album’s growth, the venerable US sound artist Andrew Deutsch responded to her doubts about using the symphonion as a key instrument with the advice: “You want to take the nostalgia out of the music box…Well then, set it on fire”. Asmar clearly took these words to heart, there’s nothing twee or cloying about this exhilarating title track.
As with all of Yara Asmar’s albums so far ‘everyone I love is sleeping and i love them so so much’ leaves the real person at the centre of the music making. The clicks and whirrs of the music boxes, the scraping, bowing and chinking of the metallophone are all essential elements in her soundscapes. This time around though this personal dimension emphasises where she is now rather than nodding back to the past. of the always puzzle of living and doing finds Asmar shaping the mechanical sounds of metallophone and symphonion into a dense looping ambient soundscape with drifting whispers of krakeb rhythms. It’s a fusion sound with real depth and a probing resonance.
Two distinctive, field recorded sound collages, after all this time, Beirut and sounds from home, frame the album perfectly with tender conversations, bird song and city hustle. They are the foundation of this sonic journal which, like Anadol’s magical ‘Felicita‘, captures the complexities of moving from a familiar past to an uncertain future, from old ties to fresher horizons, with flare and sensitivity. Yara Asmar is an artist who is clearly on the move, someone reluctant to stand still and dedicated to challenge. Another unmissable step forward in her intriguing musical journeying.
Get your copy of ‘everyone I love is sleeping and i love them so so much’ by Yara Asmar from your local record store or direct from Hive Mind Records HERE
