Raed Yassin – Eternal Ghost (Fourth Sounds)

Raed Yassin – He graduated from the Theatre Department of the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003. In 2015, he was awarded a research fellowship at the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne. An artist and musician, Yassin’s work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. One of the organisers of Irtijal Festival – Beirut’s experimental contemporary music festival – Yassin has released several music albums and founded the production company Annihaya in 2009.

With Eternal Ghost, Raed Yassin extends his ongoing excavation of memory and identity into the sonic realm. Issued by Fourth Sounds as a double A-side 12” to accompany his debut London exhibition, the record comprises two fifteen-minute slabs of modular minimalism, where loops, distortion and vocal frequencies accumulate into a dense, high-voltage architecture of sound.

Yassin’s practice has consistently interrogated the politics of remembrance and erasure. Born in Beirut (1979) and now based in Berlin, he has worked across free improvisation, Arabic pop and sample-based cultural archaeology, often reframing fragments of collective experience through the lens of consumer culture. Here, the modular electronics function as both archive and apparition: patterns repeat like half-remembered refrains, while distorted voices surface as spectral traces of histories that refuse to settle.

Photo: Christina Marx/Photomusix

The lineage is clear — echoes of Terry Riley’s hypnotic repetition, Suicide’s confrontational pulse, no wave’s abrasive textures and synth pop’s synthetic sheen — yet Yassin’s approach is less homage than détournement. By folding these references into a maximalist electronic surge, he situates his work within a transnational continuum of experimental sound, while simultaneously foregrounding the diasporic condition: restless, unsettled, haunted by displacement.

As an accompaniment to his London exhibition, Eternal Ghost operates as both soundtrack and autonomous statement. It insists that sound can be a site of cultural archaeology, where identity is not fixed but continually reassembled, and where the ghosts of history reverberate through circuits, frequencies and loops. Fans attuned to the hypnotic modular architectures of Caterina Barbieri (Patterns of Consciousness, 2017), the analogue catharsis of Marta De Pascalis (Anzar, 2016), or the spectral electronics of Alexandre Bazin (Confluences, 2023) will find much to admire in Raed Yassin’s Eternal Ghost, where repetition, distortion and memory converge in a "long-form piece of modular minimalism". Highly Recommended!

Rating: 9.4/10