A Closer Listen
Memories of conflict are very much on the mind of Yara Asmar, who splits her time between Beirut and upstate New York and tries to make sense of it all. Or perhaps there is no making sense, only a box of pieces from many puzzles. “There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” Pouring her grief into instrument-making and playing, she creates an elaborate musical tapestry of deconstruction and reconstruction. One of the symphomioms she builds is large enough to sit inside, and she invites listeners to “sit inside the sound” with her.
The white noise and whirring that open the album connote absence, swiftly countered by the sounds of traffic and chimes. “after all this time, Beirut” soon turns intimate with the warmth of a family gathering, suffused with a singsong quality. Asmar insists that the album is not nostalgic, so one might instead call it historic, which fits the ethos of Time Released Sound, whose special packaging repurposes the past for a new generation. (The album is co-released on Hive Mind.) The gorgeous single “3 wooden giants and mechanical birds (feat. John Murchison and Gideon Forbes)” glows with the comfort of companionship, a boon in what otherwise might have been a time of isolation.
The countless hours Asmar spends creating mechanical music boxes, repurposing toy pianos and exploring the timbres of the metallophone demonstrate an intense attention to detail; every note is intimate, a conversation between creator and created. For every sound that has been annihilated by outside forces – in particular the cut-throat finch, found dead in droves each sunrise, their “ears exploded by shelling and the sounds of the explosions” – Asmar tries to bring a new sound into the world. In one sense, one might call such efforts futile, because one person can never keep up; in another, it is courageous, an act of sonic defiance.
The title track is a sweetly abraded start-and-stop lullaby, a music box love letter sent across the ocean, purity washed in distortion that eventually dissolves in mist. One might call this piece a metaphor for the human condition, messages garbled and good intentions corroded, save for the fact that the piece feels like tender, injured love. “I don’t know what it means to constantly be recording out of fear of loss,” writes Asmar, “only that it has been the only way forward.”
“sounds from home” brings the field recordings back into focus. These recordings include one of the last made by the artist’s grandfather, who talks about capturing birdsong on his own recorder. The generations connect and overlap; time folds in on itself. If there is no future to yearn for, perhaps it is time to invent one, as Asmar does on this exquisite release. (Richard Allen)
Wed Oct 08 00:01:30 GMT 2025