Yara Asmar - everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much

Beirut-based ambi-folk leaning composer Yara Asmar returns to Hive Mind with this fourth collection of poetically-framed, homespun sketchbook ambiance. Asmar has a tendency to grace her songs with verbose, open-ended titles that invite particular perspectives and narrative readings, an obviously important device in her purposeful world-building approach. Still, even if she were to be more prosaic in her denominations, the music alone would be capable of a great deal of the heavy lifting. The recordings are of obviously home-made, lo-fi origin and possessed of a diaristic quality that feels both intimate and expressive of a very specific interior life. Self-made and unconventional instrumentation is key to the presentation, as is the collaging and overlaying of a bank of family-oriented field recordings, creating what feels like a window into a private world. This isn't folk in the classic sense, but it's certainly folk in principle, the kind of communications that emerge supple and secretive as if whispered gift-like directly into your ear. Asmar's writing is more impressionistic than it feels structured, which is all to the good in binding a relationship with the listener, an entre nous arrangement that makes that sees that album title as a private confession just for you. Such connections are as increasingly rare as they are entirely necessary.   
 
FFO: u.e., Jaan, A Happy Return, Pierre Bastien