蜜芽传媒

Verity Sharp shares the fruits of our latest exclusive collaboration session, a meeting of multi-instrumentalist and puppeteer Yara Asmar and Glasgow-based Scots singer and interpreter Quinie.

Yara Asmar makes use of lo-fi recording methods and works with a range of sound sources including the accordion, voice, field recordings, metallophone, deconstructed and disassembled toys, and electronics. Her work is known to be deeply-affecting, raw, intimate, and strongly rooted in place. In 2020, during the pandemic, Yara Asmar turned to recording music at home on cassettes and her mobile phone, using her grandma鈥檚 Hohner Marchesa accordion, a piano and field recordings of hymns sung in churches around Lebanon. Her work is known to be deeply affecting, raw, intimate, and strongly rooted in place. On her 2023 album, she explores ideas of depersonalisation and disconnection from our immediate surroundings, explaining in an interview that 鈥淯s, who remain here, create places that protect us from things that are happening around us鈥�. While her most recent release, Sighs II, shows the vibratory potential of metals, reflecting on the idea that metal is responding, rather than resonating, actively shaping its own afterlife.

Quinie, aka Josie Vallely, is a Glasgow-based Scots singer whose work explores landscape, place and ancestors. Quinie鈥檚 vocals use a blend of sean nos style melodies, children鈥檚 rhyme and story poems and are, at their core, inspired by Scottish Traveller singers. Whilst conscious of not being a member of the Traveller community, she has been inspired by Traveller friends who taught her that settled people sharing these songs could contribute to raising awareness. 鈥淪cottish Travellers are marginalised and discriminated against in modern Scotland, despite being custodians of so many of our important traditions. So I started to perform them and tell this story.鈥� Her third album, released in May 2025, was made following a pilgrimage across the West of Scotland on her horse, collecting and interpreting songs as she went.

Elsewhere in the show, Verity Sharp shares a collaboration between artist and slime mould, the fruits of which bear an articulation of grief fuelled by ecological decline; and a paean to trans lives. Plus, a shimmering, beating, flittering, bubble-like response to a cassette tape score, and a soulful, improvised delivery of folk tales told via mini-choir from Chicago.

Produced by Cat Gough
A Reduced Listening production for 蜜芽传媒 Radio 3