https://morphine.substack.com/p/yara-asmar
yara asmar
artist direct: puppets, clowns, and building a world on graveyards
Apr 09, 2025
play: ‘it‘s 5:00pm and nothing bad has happened to us‘ (yet) from synth waltzes and accordion laments by Yara Asmar
i’ve been wanting to publish this interview with Yara Asmar for quite some time now. her music speaks volumes to me. the troubled silence it occupies reveals everything with pristine clarity, leaving behind a strange, disturbing sensation. you can‘t quite pinpoint the root, yet it stings, sharply.
Asmar, hails from Beirut, Lebanon, where her life includes shapeshifting homes, families, friends, and many cats. she’s both a musician and a puppeteer — two crafts that seem to exchange sentiments with each other. in her world of emotional conversations, she says everything she needs to in sparse rhythms: tinkling instruments, detonated silences, and the gentle mischief of theatrical puppets. there’s a silly humour in the way she frames her story, but also a deep undercurrent of grief.
one of her songs is titled ‘i am a terrible mathematician and an even worse clown’. “it’s true,” she says. “i wanted to be a clown forever. i can’t juggle to save my life.” the frequencies in which she thrives is truly her own, each composition living in a small eternity, looping endlessly. exquisite beauty and pain dance together in the cerebrals. music for observers who don’t mind being observed.
play: ‘to live by a water is to forget it exists‘ from Stuttering Music by Yara Asmar
quoting a previous interview, ‘we need to become a bit delusional to remain sane.’ disconnection can be a form of self-preservation.
can i disagree with myself here?
this is one of these times where words have failed me. i think what i was trying to say is that: the world has been built wrong. all of it. to still be operating within it in any way whatsoever means that there is a degree of delusion driving us. to still be making work is delusional. maybe that sentence was stemming from guilt. the guilt of still making things. some days, making things because it’s the only thing my hands know how to do. other days because i need to pay the rent.
this is a world built on graveyards, from graveyards, and any good you will find here is created by an immense effort on the part of people, any good is a good that exists despite, and in spite of this graveyard world we inhabit. no good that you find in this scary world is an accident. it is an organised, tactical striving for good. this isn’t a system that naturally creates good things. maybe by delusion here I mean that, we are working against a giant, within the confines of a structure that was built to crush us. maybe delusion isn’t the word i was looking for. maybe what i meant was courage. the courage to dream and believe you can make something good for everyone you love in the middle of everything bad.
this is a musical puppeteer’s soft and emotionally intense world. what is it hiding?
i don’t know if it’s concealing anything. i think, if anything, that this world was built to reveal things. it was of course born out of necessity. at the centre of the big “today” that’s always eating and feeding itself like a terrifying ouroboros, i think there are pockets of time you find. i’m not very good at describing it but i have a feeling that everyone experiences it. if you stand in exactly the right place, at a specific time, you’re in one of these pockets.
it’s a strange feeling you can sometimes have if you step out of your house too early at dawn. it feels like cheating, like seeing something you’re not supposed to. eternity is one of my biggest fears, and i think this little world is an attempt at making something that, in all its ugliness and fragility, resists eternity, to find one of these pockets of time that you can stand inside with the comfort of knowing that once you do leave it, it leaves you too. it doesn’t always work. in fact, it almost never does. but that’s what this work is usually trying to do.
play: ‘three clementines on the counter of a blue-tiled sun-soaked kitchen‘ from synth waltzes and accordion laments by Yara Asmar
why toys and tinkling instruments? do you think this all came to be because you accidentally discovered your grandmother’s accordion?
i don’t know. it’s something i still try to figure out.
i think i’m generally really drawn to metal as a material and its sound properties. if ghosts have a home in this world it definitely exists within the confines of metallic things. in a world where i could afford it, i’d probably just own a vibraphone and forget about everything else. i don’t know that it ever was about toys as an object, rather than the materiality of metal which links a lot of these objects i’ve worked with, from music boxes to toy pianos and metallophones.
i understand though how burdened with sentimentality these timbres are, already nostalgic before they’ve gotten to say what they were tasked to say. a music box cannot be a blank canvas in the way a piano can be. a music box is somehow always performing itself as an object first and foremost, before it can perform anything else. the way i’ve experienced it at least.
but also,
a lot of it has a lot to do with there-ness. rather than search for things, i’ll usually work with the things that are already around me, or things that find their way to me, sometimes by accident, sometimes gifted to me. i have great difficulty making decisions and choosing things; it makes me extremely anxious. so more often than not i’ll work with the limitations of whatever is in my line of sight. it’s why most of my work ends up being really diy. what can my hands do right now with what they’re given? and these are the things i’ve been given.
play: ‘to die in the country‘ from home recordings 2018-2021 by Yara Asmar
i’m fascinated by the titles of your songs. they are silly and sad. they also feel like fragments of a larger narrative. do these characters find their way into your puppet scripts?
most of the time the titles are just really stupid thoughts that I use as a “temporary” title for a song until I find a real “serious” title but then they end up sticking. like “Fish can’t tie their shoelaces, silly”. i definitely meant to change that one eventually. sometimes they’re just facts. “i am a terrible mathematician (and an even worse clown)” for example. it’s true. i used to be a clown. i wanted to be a clown forever. i was terrible. i can’t juggle to save my life. i’m only funny on occasion, by accident. i am as equally terrible at clowning as i am at maths. i don’t know what that means.
other times the titles are diaristic. “from gardens in the city we keep alive” is my grandfather’s garden in Beirut. in his garden he planted an avocado tree which has outlived him. the neighbours used to complain that avocados kept falling into the street and onto their cars. now that he’s passed the avocados still fall out onto the street but now they have no one to complain to. i think it’s hilarious—my grandpa’s way of still annoying the neighbours after his passing. we should probably do something about that tree.
i think “objects lost in drawers (found again at the most inconvenient times)” is the epitome of the silly sad thing that you mentioned. a few months before my grandpa passed away, he kept insisting i take home a croissant to eat on the way even though i really didn’t want to. i took it just so we would stop arguing. i didn’t cry at the funeral. i’d done all my crying in his last few weeks when we were watching him slip away. months later, i opened one of my drawers and found the smushed up packaged croissant. i don’t even remember putting it there, or why i would even put it in that drawer. it was funny, but mostly it was really sad. and i cried and i cried for hours. the croissant is still there, standing proud and stubborn. take that grandpa, i didn’t eat the croissant.
but yes more often than not they’re just ridiculous thoughts that cross my mind.
the titles will sometimes as you mentioned, turn into puppet dialogues. “i liked it better when we lived on see-saw hill” (from synth waltzes and accordion laments) crept back into my life around a year later to a conversation between a discarded clock and an old crow who, despite not being the best of friends, only have each other in what’s left of their deserted town:
or “thanks for coming” which was one of my earliest recordings and later became “a funeral is a party” which played in episode 3 of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories:
are these puppets an extension of you? what about Gloomy Madeleine from Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories?
i’m not quite sure how many i’ve made. i go through periods of making a lot of puppets, some of them that i never really end up using. some are uglier than others. the puppets will often be one aspect of a person I know, or a sentence they say that unfolds into an entire universe. it isn’t really representative of the people themselves, but rather what that aspect of them or what that sentence they said would be like if it occupied a world on its own. of course the puppets are sometimes some of my own anxieties that i turn into characters.
Gloomy Madeleine for example is a mixture of my own anxiety, with that of someone I won’t name here whom I really love. that person finds comfort in specific sorts of rules and routines they set for themselves, and they become adamant and very specific about some things. so Gloomy Madeleine is a character that means well but can sound a little aggressive, even though everything comes from a place of love and of fear and of wanting everything to be okay, to create a home that’s safe for her and her friends.
she is very protective of that routine even when it harms her, even when she hates it. there is a sort of loyalty there that I admire, a sort of romantic dedication to a way of doing things that i see in some of the stubborn people i’ve loved. it deserves to stretch out across an entire universe; it is worthy of being a character with a life of its own, according to the logic of this universe within which these puppets operate.
watch: ‘Mr Samuel’s Teatime Stories’ a four-part film written and directed by Yara Asmar.
in Mr Samuel’s Teamtime Stories, themes of time, death, loss, and confusion are apparent. the set design takes inspiration from the “coloured cells” by French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic, which was the first use of modern art as a method of psychotechnic torture. was creating this project a tormenting process or a cathartic one?
it’s been so long since i wrote Mr. Samuel. i think it was around 4 years ago. it was a whole other lifetime. i think the Anarchist Library mentions that this was some sort of anti-anarchist propaganda; i can believe that. i had originally read about it in Zizek’s The Parallax View. wither way, writing out the script was definitely cathartic. i wrote it because i needed to. filming it was also nice because the team was lovely to work with. but everything after was torture. i couldn’t be done with it fast enough. i usually work very quickly and then forget about the thing I made. the way I work usually is a sort of “getting rid of” things.
i need a thing off my chest so i throw it out. but then Mr. Samuel just went on and on and on, bringing me back to a part of my life that i really needed to be disconnected from. which kind of completely beat the point of why i made it in the first place. i needed it to end. of course later when the videos were public and i was shocked at the wider audience who connected with it, it filled me with a lot of tenderness and gratefulness despite the horrible anxiety. it also made Michael, who was the main actor in this series, very happy. he passed away this summer, and since then I really don’t want to hear about this show anymore. or talk about it. i still do of course; it exists in the world and i have to answer for it sometimes. i just don’t really want to.
play: ‘I’m a terrible mathematician (and an even worse clown)’ from Stuttering Music by Yara Asmar
did the music begin as a soundtrack for your puppet stories, or did the puppetry emerge from the music?
i think they’ve both fed into each other quite a bit. music came first for sure. although i know my answer to this changes sometimes. somewhere in my memory i think that i first recorded music for one of my puppets. but right now i think as far back as i could and it was always sound that came first. everything else followed. i don’t really know. i have a bit of difficulty drawing lines between things. I’m not good at separating things from each other. it’s a bit of a problem.
do you create things you’d rather keep to yourself? do you ever worry about being too seen?
i get very anxious about being seen. when Mr. Samuel videos garnered a bit of attention i spiralled and got very panicky. i still get anxious checking the comments so i don’t do it anymore. the times where i did check what people were saying though, i was really touched, especially knowing that these silly puppet videos had brought comfort to some people. i guess that’s what makes the risk of being seen okay, reaching across the void and putting an arm around a stranger’s shoulder, and having that stranger do the same. the fear of being seen and the comfort of being known come hand in hand, and it does require a sort of blind trust in the big ‘other’.
something that I’m not sure i was built to have. but i try.
i guess i do make a lot of things i don’t show anyone. however there was never any separation or distance between me and my work, so any protective measures i take are never really capable of keeping me safe. i don’t think through or refine what I make, it is very impulse-driven. i might as well hand everyone a knife and hope they don’t drive it through my heart. maybe that’s what I’m doing.
play: ‘objects lost in drawers (found again at the most inconvenient times)’ from home recordings 2018 – 2021 by Yara Asmar
what if your musical puppetry world is writing you, rather than the other way around?
it does often feel like that. i’m usually trying to get away from puppet songs, and i’m not sure why i tend to fall into them sometimes. they usually start as an obsessive thought that doesn’t go away until i carry it out. it’s a strange nagging string of words that follows me around until it’s impossible to ignore. when this happens i know it’s time to stop everything and make a new puppet. i try to do this quickly to get it out of the way. once i’m cornered by one of these obsessive thoughts, i leave everything and by the end of the day i’ve most probably made a new puppet and had it sing the song.
a big thank you to Yara Asmar for taking the time to chat with me. i’m a huge fan.