Yara Asmar - Stuttering Music

A Closer Listen

By 2006, more than a decade and a half after the conclusion of the Lebanese Civil War, the city of Beirut seemed to be experiencing an era of cultural resurgence. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had finally ended in 2000, and free of the association with conflict, Beirut’s cultural vibrancy was becoming a regular feature in newspapers and TV. That summer, I visited Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition Out of Beirut, showcasing the post-war work of 18 artists. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s faded and degraded Postcards of War were among the works that addressed the shadow of war most explicitly, while other works, such as the bright bold gestural abstractions of Saloua Raouda Choucair, took a very different approach. It was noted at the time that “politics and memory are still major preoccupations for these artists,” and inescapably so, as just a few short weeks later, Israel began bombing Beirut once again. Readers may be familiar with this event from a notable episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, in which he and the crew became trapped in the city. And of course the city is once again being bombed as I write this.

Yara Asmar is a Lebanese musician and video artist based in Beirut, and the release of her third album, Stuttering Music, has sadly coincided with this latest resurgence of conflict. A puppeteer, Asmar turned to home taping during the pandemic, using broken instruments, field recordings and deconstructed music boxes to sculpt delicate and enchanting lo-fi compositions. Her debut, home recordings 2018-2021, was released in fall 2022, as we noted in our fall previews that year, and I included 2023’s synth waltzes & accordion laments in my personal end of year list, though I missed my chance to grab a cassette copy. Luckily both records have been released jointly on vinyl, as home recordings 2018 – 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered), just shortly in advance of Stuttering Music, released on Ruptured.

Stuttering Music was born out of improvised performances broadcast on Palestine’s Radio alHara, but sounds remarkably coherent and thoughtful in its development. Compared with the lo-fi aesthetic of her earlier work, Radio alHara provided Asmar the opportunity to work more deeply with the studio. The toy instruments and edited field recordings of her earliest work have gradually given way as her grandmother’s accordion has increasingly taken center stage, as it does on Stuttering Music, its drones drifting and mutating, processed and thickened with electroacoustic effects. At times reminiscent of Tim Hecker’s tectonic drones or Keith Fullerton Whitman’s ethereal signal processing, the most obvious referent may be the way Pauline Oliveros treated her own accordion sounds, though Asmar’s dilation of time functions more through streaked harmonic overtones rather than accumulated delays.

The album begins with “to live by a body of water is to forget it exists,” the shortest track on the album by far, minimally consisting of sustained metallic drones with some hammered metallophone notes at the end of its 96 seconds, signaling a coming change. After that gentle introduction, the accordion enters tentatively, evolving patiently over nine hypnotic minutes in the poetically titled “in fields of translucent pearls i am the richest man in the graveyard and i will never have to bury anyone i love ever again.” Absent any words, voices, or concrete sounds within the music, these evocative lowercase titles obscure as much as they reveal, adding to a pleasant sense of disorientation. Not unlike Saloua Raouda Choucair’s abstract paintings, it is refreshing to see Asmar mining her relationship to her home and history—using her grandmother’s lost accordion, transforming her phone recordings of the city’s churches into waltzes—without having to center the tragedy, conflict, and war that so often dominates the discourse on Lebanon. After all, this is art, not documentary, and Asmar has no obligation to cater to Western media narratives. She should be able to title her album with an obscure reference to an experimental Japanese film as much as any other artist. That said, she clearly has a personal stake in what for many is just another news story, and she has announced that she’ll be donating her share of the profits from her albums to practical relief efforts.

The accordion becomes less recognizable on “cold feet and hot air balloons,” morphing halfway through into something even more ethereal and transcendent. There are occasional moments of intensity as well that belie that description, however the overall affect is one of somber meditation. The five-minute centerpiece, “may,” returns to the high frequencies drones of the intro, but with greater complexity, as various small sounds transform the structural development of the piece. The accordion drones return in full force for ‘”all that has been seen will have been seen for nothing,”’ the longest composition on the album, but rather than retread the slow accumulation of earlier tracks, here she explores pitch-shifting and distortion, not unlike the techniques Cole Pulice has been developing with their saxophone.

Asmar’s approach to the accordion is all the more enchanting as it is so far removed from the instrument’s stereotypical associations, none of the shuffling rhythms or sentimental melodies. At a relatively economically five minutes, “i am a terrible mathematician (and an even worse clown)” is a logical choice for a single, but this reduced run time also demonstrates that Asmar is equally competent at working in modes other than long form drones. The accordion’s chords are more clearly discernible, but still articulated so slowly that the emphasis always remains on textural exploration and that sense of catharsis that is so unique to melancholy. The nearly eleven-minute long closer, “there are easier ways to disappear (but i’m only good at this one)” is perhaps the most endearing, as the delicate percussive sounds of her earlier work return. When Stuttering Music finally fades out, just flip the tape and begin again. (Joseph Sannicandro)