“Hive Mind are thrilled to be working with Yara Asmar and to bring you this wonderful debut album of music she recorded at home on cassettes and a mobile phone over the past few years. On it you’ll hear her play a range of instruments including the piano, her grandmother’s old accordion, the metallophone, synth, and various deconstructed and disassembled toy pianos and music boxes. You’ll also hear her field-recordings of hymns sung in churches around Lebanon which Yara has turned into waltzes. These beautifully melodic works contain recognisable elements of classical music wrapped in layers of tape hiss, synth wash, reverb and delay and disturbed by the metallic percussive sounds of the dissembled music boxes. The atmosphere of melancholy that pervades the album should be familiar to anyone living in the 21st Century.”
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Spectrum Culture
”Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie tension out of dreamlike layers of isolation”
Foxy Digitalis
"Tiny worlds expand and contract in the palm of Yara Asmar’s hand. These recordings are remarkable in their ability to command attention in the gentlest terms. There are stories to find on this album and new worlds to discover."
Greedy for Best Music Review
“Reminiscent of a minuscule music box, these delicate, cinematic recordings might be likened to an album of snapshots capturing life in its most furtive moments. Imagine finding such a music box hidden away in a drawer, somewhere among the personal belongings of a soul that has moved on, leaving only scattered traces of its existence behind to be discovered and interpreted by others, never revealing their true meaning, but nonetheless inspiring a world of speculation. And as the revolving cylinder begins to play its soulful, mechanical tune, a multitude of emotions arise and the mind sets sail.”
Boomkat
“Using her grandmother's accordion, glockenspiel, toy piano and music boxes, Beirut-based puppeteer and artist Yara Asmar enchants with her ferric, homespun debut. RIYL Colleen, Susumu Yokota, múm”
Monolith Cocktail
"a truly dreamy, translucent and amorphous album of delicate classicism, explorative percussion and ambient”
The Vinyl District
Methodical and robust. Home Recordings 2018–2021 is a remarkable debut.