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“Oh, hello there!” Mr. Samuel greets us warmly, his tone inviting yet slightly offbeat. “I wasn’t expecting you. Welcome home!” With this introduction, we’re ushered into the world of Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids and Confused Adults. We’re welcomed like old friends into an unfamiliar space – a vibrant set that feels like it belongs to a children’s TV show, yet hums with something darker. The characters’ slow pace, elongated pauses, and subtly unsettling tone suggest there’s more beneath the surface. Sharing the show with him is a clock that goes by the name Gloomy Madeleine, played by Yara Asmar, the creator and writer of the show.
Across four episodes, the series unfolds as a meditation on themes like home, identity, memory, time, and death – concepts that have long occupied the creative mind of Yara. For her, art becomes a means of compartmentalising these weighty ideas, “putting them in boxes,” and moving forward.
These preoccupations are not limited to her visual storytelling. Yara’s musical explorations reveal a similar fascination. Over the years, she’s released three albums: Home Recordings 2018-2021, Synth Waltzes & Accordion Laments – praised by Pitchfork as “a set that transmutes the instrument’s droning tones into a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty” – and her most recent work, Stuttering Music.
A self-described “defender of sound,” Yara’s compositions are primarily instrumental, unrestrained, ambient, and deeply evocative. She pushes the boundaries of her instruments, transforming their tones into expansive auditory landscapes that echo with emotion. Her artistry extends beyond music, weaving puppetry and surrealist elements into her visual works to create immersive, otherworldly narratives.
ICON MENA sat down with the multidisciplinary Lebanese artist to discuss sonic memory, (not) living in the present, and the uncanny allure of children’s television.
SA: Take us back to the beginnings, won’t you?
YA: It’s always so difficult to trace the beginnings. Where do the stories start? [My answer] changes every time someone asks me the question. Maybe it starts when I found my grandma’s accordion in the attic. I looked at this beautiful instrument and I wanted to learn it, but I just didn’t understand the layout of the notes. Eventually, I sat down with it and started learning it slowly. And then what came in after was the metallophone. I remember seeing a metallophone in a music store, and the first thing I thought was, “How would these notes sound if they were bowed?” So I got some rosin, and then it made this really beautiful sustained tone. I don’t have a logical explanation or theorisation. I was never very good at being conceptual. It’s really just these micro-obsessions that pop up, and I just have to follow them. And then I do.
What about your first album?
I used to put out little snippets of music for the world, but I didn’t consider myself a musician. Radio al-Hara reached out to me offering a monthly show, so I started recording these improvisations. I’d put my phone to record and just start playing for an hour. The show was called Half-Baked Waltzes 2 Fold Ur Laundry To.
It was such a generous space they offered me because I’d never had a sonic space before. I could try things, and experiment, and it felt like little tests. Some stuff would fail, some would work, some would stick, and some would be thrown out into the void. Then one day, Mark from Hivemind Records reached out to me and we released Home Recordings on a cassette, and they just remastered them for vinyl, which is crazy.
So, it’s the stuff I recorded on my phone and my tape recorder, and now it’s on a record. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s what happened.
Do you feel things happen organically with you and fall into place leading you to the next thing?
Yes. Not to say that it’s not difficult; it’s very difficult to pay your rent when you’re doing music full time. But the feeling of being carried is a source of comfort for me. There’s also always this fear that one day I might just lose it, because I don’t know what it is. Just because it’s been there doesn’t mean it’s always going to be fine on its own.
It feels like I’m here almost by chance. Things happen, and I’m just a part of those things happening. I become more of an object in the things happening rather than the subject making them happen. I just happen to be one of the characters in that narrative, and I’m playing out my role in it.
I feel like this also shows the sense of community we have as Arabs in general, a sense of people catching each other. I think we’ve demonstrated that over time.
What does it mean to survive as a musician who comes from this part of the world?
It means that a lot of the time, you depend on money from abroad – something I’m not very comfortable with. I think a lot of us aren’t. If you’re living off being an artist, it means you’re living off grants, and residencies, and a lot of your money comes from a part of the world that has actively destroyed your part of the world, funded the destruction, and then gives you these little monetary rewards.
So, when I see us creating a community and trying to create opportunities for each other as Arabs, despite the limited resources we have, I am hopeful for the future.
Since last year, you start realising that maybe some of us were a little delusional about how the world works. Maybe some of us thought it was out of ignorance or lack of knowledge that people in the West operated the way they did. But the information is out there, the videos are out there, the media is out there—the cards are all on the table. And suddenly, the world is very clearly, as it always was, blind to it.
It becomes this camp of “Who is with us and who is not with us?” There’s this hope that we can build something on our own and that as an artist if you want to pay your rent, you won’t have to take your money from questionable sources. You won’t have to take your money from fascist governments trying to further their agendas. But yeah, that’s another rant I just went on.
They say that an artist is a child who never truly grows up. Do you feel that the curiosity you had as a child still stays with you? Do you think this sense of wonder and exploration is something that many adults lose as they grow older?
I don’t believe people lose it. I think it’s always there for everyone. Some of us are just given the opportunity to lean into it more than others. I consider myself lucky to have had that chance. Anyone who does have the space for it will naturally engage with it. It’s how we understand and make sense of the world. We need to touch things and see what our hands can do with them. In a world that truly makes sense, this is what we would all be doing in our own ways.
In Home Recordings you have these beautifully unusual titles; “three clementines on the counter of a blue-tiled sun-soaked kitchen” or “we put her in a box and never spoke of her again.”
The blue-tiled sun-soaked kitchen is my grandma’s kitchen, and it comes from a little poem I wrote.
My grandmother had this charming kitchen with beautiful blue tiles. It always felt like a place suspended in time. I remember one day walking in and seeing three clementines on the counter, the sun shining through, casting a spotlight on these fiery orange fruits.
Both my grandparents have passed away. A few months ago, I was on a video call with my dad, and they had torn down the house to renovate the kitchen and the apartment. That was their way of grieving – changing the house so it wouldn’t remain frozen in time, a photograph of the past. It served its purpose for them – but for me, it was heartbreaking.
I saw that the kitchen was completely gone. I cried more when I saw that the kitchen had disappeared than I did at my grandma’s or grandpa’s funeral. Not only had I lost the people who walked through those halls, but I had lost the halls themselves. I lost the memory of them and everything that reminded me of them.
Some people throw their belongings away.
In that sense, I’m very much a hoarder. If it were up to me, I would have kept that kitchen forever. I would have made sure that it lived forever.
Do you approach memories in general this way?
I document a lot. I’m always in this perpetual state of fear, of losing things and people. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a present moment in my life. I experience the present like it’s the past. I situate myself in a sort of future in which I am looking back at this moment. Anytime I’m having a conversation with my mother or a friend, I am watching this conversation through an older version of myself who may or may not still have that person in her life. I feel like I need to catch everything around me.
In my grandfather’s last few years, I was always recording him speaking and taking videos of him, even when it annoyed him. [It’s also important] to have a recording of someone’s voice, because I think that’s the first thing you lose when you lose someone. You lose their voice.
Your voice is very much a part of yourself, something that comes from deep within, but it’s also the only part of you that’s actively reaching out into the world. Your voice exists in relation to whoever is listening to it. It’s always in a constant state of reaching out. When someone passes away, their body might still be there, in theory, but the first thing you lose is their voice. You don’t hear it anymore.
Do you feel like your memories are more sound focused?
Yes, and my memories are very much sonic more than they are visual. Even taking photos and videos, or recording sounds for me is like highlighting in a book. When I’m highlighting in a book, not only am I highlighting for a future me looking back at this, but also for committing this specific sentence to my memory.
When you’re documenting something, it’s not so much about looking back at this memory, but about making a point of documenting this so that you will remember it. It’s like highlighting in real life.
I’ve always been someone who records sound more than I record video. I will always be the number one defender of sound. Sound can often be the most overlooked sense consciously, but it affects you so much, and so do you.
Thoughts on silence?
There’s this almost impossibility of true silence. A lot of people have spoken about it, including [American composer] John Cage, who even wrote a whole book on silence. The unsettling thing is realising that you can almost never be in a place that is truly silent. It’s kind of horrifying, honestly.
Some claim that being in a quiet place can cause a person to go insane because of the peculiarity of such intense silence. I think that’s a torture method as well.
Mr. Samuel’s set is inspired by these ‘coloured cells’ by French anarchist [Alphonse] Laurencic. They were the first use of modern art as a method of psychotechnic torture. It’s overwhelmingly bright colours and patterns all around you. And to me, that is torture. That’s a lot more torturous than silence.
Do you have any favourite sounds?
Now that I’m away from Beirut, I will say I love the sound of people outside, casually screaming to each other from balconies and having loud conversations. You can hear people’s entire conversations from your room.
There’s something very comforting about this reminder that everyone around you is still alive and that everyone around you is doing their thing. There’s a beautiful buzz to it, something I miss a lot.
What’s your recording process with no set structure as opposed to mainstream songs?
It’s always a search. Some people would say I haven’t ‘found my sound’, which I don’t really like that expression. But I think I reached a point where I realised I won’t find it. I’m never going to find it, because it’s a process of looking. I’ve never found any hill I could die on. You know, musically, it’s more like, oh, you meet an idea, you flirt with it a little, you brush shoulders with it. That’s how it goes.
When I put out an album or any kind of music, it’s kind of a postcard of where I am right now with this process of searching. And I think this is a lifelong process of searching. I don’t think I’ve arrived at anything. I don’t think I’ll ever arrive at anything.
The way I am, my whole project, my whole life, is this process of searching, knowing that I’m not going to arrive at anything.
In Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories, why did you choose to explore dark themes through the seemingly comforting aesthetic of a children’s TV set? Kids’ TV shows are already dark, scary and horrifying, in the sense that they are an arm of the spectacle which we’ve been put into. We exist within this spectacle of capitalism, of imperialism – whatever you want to call it. TV is an arm of this system, reinforcing it. Everything on TV, in general, is horrifying because it reinforces this spectacle, saying, ‘This is what’s real.’
Do you ever sit with younger cousins as a grown-up and watch what’s on TV? Do you see how happy all the characters are? It’s horrifying. They speak in ways that no one speaks like in the real world. If someone spoke to you like this in real life, they’d be arrested. Children’s TV shows never show you how it’s okay to be sad, to be depressed, to cry.
People smile once in a while, but we live in a really sad world. I don’t see these as two opposing things – like the comfort of a TV show versus the existentialist fear that everything is wrong. I see kids’ TV programming as the very embodiment of what’s wrong in the world.
I think kids’ TV programming is the perfect place to show this because this is where the disconnect starts. There’s something, of course, about using signs and signifiers and mediums that are almost universal – things that everyone can identify with. I come from Lebanon; we didn’t have Mr. Rogers, I don’t know what it was called. But we had “Mini Studio” and “Kids Power”.
Because it infected us, it infected everyone. TV has its little dendrites everywhere in the world. We had our own strange version of it.
The show feels like a personal hell or limbo for the characters, exploring themes like being trapped in one’s mind or the limits of consciousness. Other viewers interpret the show differently, some see it as reflecting dementia or personal memories. How do you feel about the wide range of interpretations online?
By the time we put out the show, I had completely disconnected from it. I only put it up on YouTube so that everyone could add it to their portfolio. I didn’t think anyone would be seeing this. I was horrified when I started getting notifications. Suddenly, a lot of people were seeing this, and I was just paralysed with anxiety.
That was a script I had written years ago. I wasn’t there anymore, and I almost didn’t want to be associated with that nostalgia, and everything around it. But then people connect with things for reasons, and it doesn’t matter that I’m not there anymore. My mom would constantly refresh the page and she’d insist that I would read every single comment. The comments were by people relating it to their grandma having dementia, others sharing how they’ve always felt deeply depressed and lonely, but then found comfort in the show.
At first glance, some people might think it’s a show trying to be creepy or unsettling. But at its core, I’ve never wanted to make people feel bad with any of the work I put out. It was never about creating a bad place, because the world is the bad place.
If you really watch “Mr. Samuel” and listen to the songs, I’m aiming for the atmosphere to be soft. I want the characters to be sweet and kind, even if they’re weird, ugly, and not very good at making friends. Sometimes they get a little angry because someone said the wrong thing about time, or someone came in at the wrong time during the show. Because everyone’s a little bit confused, and no one really knows what they’re supposed to be doing. But they’re not evil characters, and they’re not out there to hurt the viewer or the listener.
Anytime I’m making anything, especially with the puppet videos, it’s always my attempt at taking a pain or a feeling, putting it in a box and giving it a name. And then, in this way, you kind of arrest it, you imprison it.
This is what “Mr. Samuel” is – just taking this thing that I feel I can’t control, and controlling it. And then, if people can connect with it, that’s wonderful, because that means that somehow I was able to also control their uncontrollable fear and put it in a little box.
The world isn’t any less terrifying once an artist puts out a piece of music or a film. We’re still living in the same horrifying world, but [it’s important] to look for each other in the middle of this weird world, to find each other, to keep each other warm, and to build these communities. I think this is the most important part: to always keep reaching out. Because we are living in a world where one of its biggest crimes is not letting us imagine a better world where we can reach out to each other. The more you isolate us from each other, the more we can be subdued, tired, and not fight against whatever it is that we’re up against, which feels huge and uncontrollable. And then we find each other. We slowly find each other.
Mr. Samuel is played by Dr. Michael Dennison, your former poetry teacher who recently passed away. Could you share how his involvement shaped the show?
He was this wonderful poet, professor, and friend – someone who became very dear to me. He was like a magical person, magical in every sense of the word. And he passed away recently. He was also very grateful for the Mr. Samuel’s world. He would send me screenshots of comments.
That’s what kept the show very special for me. I think he’s one of the best writers and poets out there, a wonderful performer. He never got the chance to fully show what a wonderful performer he was, but I’m grateful that he was able to do so through that show. So much of the character relies on him, on who he is and how he speaks, how he expresses himself.
His final scene in the show focuses on grief, almost resembling a funeral for him before his passing.
Had we known, we would have given him a grander goodbye.
Words: Sami Abd Elbaki
