Everyone I Love Is Sleeping and I Love Them So So Much

The Lebanese poet, musician, sound artist and puppeteer Yara Asmar makes some of the most intimate music in the world – in the sense that, even without lyrics, you feel like you’re being allowed into the most private of thoughts. On her third collection for the UK’s endlessly exploratory Hive Mind label, recorded between upstate New York and Beirut, she uses the techniques of jazz, improv, micro-detailed folktronica, field recording and minimalist composition, but no influence is audible in any of the finished pieces, so complete is her miniature world building and expression of the kind of emotions which words can’t quite reach.