This is the second time I have written about artist and musician Raed Yassin this year, the second time we have spoken at length online, and the second time where the subject has concerned the theme of ghosts, spectres and phantoms. In one sense, there is a familiarity to the experience. A familiarity to the ritual of interview, framed by introductions, small talk and professional formalities. But there is also a familiarity to the rhythm and pacing of the conversation, the cadence of Yassin’s phrasing, the way he sees the world. Time may have passed, but we have been here before.

And yet, like all re-productions, things have changed and in the first instance the context is different. Yassin is not at home in Berlin, but in a hotel in Bogotá, closing the window to keep out the sounds of the street below. He is on tour with his Arabic pop duo Praed, but we are here to discuss Phantom Orchestra, a project first conceived in 2021 that Yassin recently staged for only the sixth time, and for the first time in UK at Ibraaz in London within Ibrahim Mahama’s installation Parliament of Ghosts (2025).

The performance of Phantom Orchestra involves 12 turntables, three mixers and six speakers, through which Yassin manipulates 42 dubplates – individually cut vinyl records –featuring recordings of solo musicians, recorded during the pandemic in Berlin. The dubplates constitute an archive of the city’s free improvisation scene under the isolating conditions of lockdown, brought together in new arrangements by Yassin in an act of speculative turntablism and collaged together in real time. Like all recordings, they haunt the space, materialising evidence of an absent other. And like all archives, they change and take on new meanings over time. Familiar, but somehow different. Fixed, but somehow disappearing.

‘For me the idea of phantom is that the musicians are not there’, Yassin elaborates. ‘But their sound is there, their recorded material is there.’ This trace, Yassin explains, when cut into vinyl – and the altogether more fragile medium of a dubplate – is in a state of continual decay. Dubplates are not stable carriers of information. With each rotation, the needle on a turntable will degrade the fidelity of the recording a little more. Theodor W. Adorno called early shellac discs ‘acoustic daguerreotypes’ for the spectral nature with which the recorded sound was obscured by the medium, like faces emerging from the plate. And while vinyl offers greater clarity, the medium still has its say in the crackle, pop and hiss of the groove. ‘Every time you play the record’, Yassin continues, ‘it becomes more and more ghostly, it becomes more and more of a phantom.’ As it does so, it becomes an archive of its own use. Wear and wear out. Until eventually, in the distant future, the sound will cease to exist at all.

The tension between the material and the ephemeral, between remembering and forgetting, has been central to Yassin’s work for over twenty years. Born in Beirut in 1979, Yassin’s background was initially in theatre, where he developed a keen eye for the power of gesture, both in his own practice and popular culture more broadly. As an artist and musician – a distinction he would rather not make – Yassin has been unbounded by form to the extent that it is easier to talk about his attitude and approach than it is about genre. Installations, performance, sound, moving image, sculpture are all employed as and when the subject demands it. Sometimes Yassin is present, sometimes he is absent. Throughout is a consistent interest in archives and the volatile mediums of video, photography, and sound recordings which are drawn on not only for their content but for their capacity to speak across time and space, and tease out the connections between personal and collective memory.

In CW Tapes (2005) released in 2019, Yassin wove together political speeches, radio and television commercials, local 80s pop music, dubbed Japanese anime songs, propaganda, resistance, and revolutionary party songs from the Lebanese Civil War, described by Yassin as ‘Proust’s madeleines to any individual who was old enough to remember the war and its immediate aftermath.’ Two years later, Archeophony heard Yassin turn his archival ear to repositories of recordings made by Western ethnomusicologists between the 1950s and 1980s, reanimating not just the music itself, but revealing how the sonic gaze of the recordist shapes and distorts the material.

In both cases, as in Phantom Orchestra, collage emerges as a political intervention, to reassemble and juxtapose a heap of broken sounds and images in ways that shed new light on official narratives in the wake of war and rupture. ‘It depends how you place things together’, Yassin explains. ‘The interesting thing in collage art is to create different realities and narratives from those that were presented to you.’ Yassin points to the work of Christian Marclay, Luc Ferrari, John Oswald, and the world of plunderphonics as inspirations. ‘It comes from my approach to turntablism’, he continues. ‘When you are a turntablist, most of the time you are using the material of others, and this can create an interesting bridge with the listener, because they can relate to certain sounds. That manipulates the way they perceive the piece. It manipulates their unconscious, so that they can start to see different narratives.’

Although we are yet to fully reckon with its effects, there have been few ruptures quite as totalising as the pandemic. And while loss is often on his mind, Yassin’s interest lies not in nostalgia or despair, but in the productive tension that emerges when the past makes contact with the present, or more specifically, the act of being present. No music demands presence quite as insistently as free jazz and improvisation. It is music that comes into existence when it is performed and it will never be the same twice. ‘The whole point behind it is just to experience the moment’, Yassin explains, himself an improviser and member of the group “A” Trio. ‘And there is something more fragile, something more ephemeral about it because of this.’ Embedded in the Berlin scene, Yassin saw first-hand how big an impact Covid lockdowns had on musicians whose work could only really exist live, in a room, with other people.

‘The musicians in this scene started to change the way they think and how they play the music’, he continues. Some adapted formal elements of their work, making technical or aesthetic adjustments because they could only rehearse at home, while others questioned themselves on more fundamental levels, not least the woodwind players and singers whose primary medium, the breath, was now implicated in the spread of infection. Rather than working with pre-existing material ‘in this case, I was creating the archive, I was being the archivist or the musicologist’, Yassin explains. ‘I thought it was an important moment in history for this particular music, because something had changed.’ What was the sound of the collective unconscious in this moment? Could it be captured and recorded? And how might that be heard over time?

Phantom Orchestra was his response. The musicians were invited to make solo recordings at newly opened venue and studio Morphine Raum across four months in 2021. These recordings were cut onto dubplate to be reanimated by Yassin in his own form of structured free improvisation. ‘It's reimagining how we could play together’, he continues. ‘As a performer of this project, I want to be in the here and now.’ Yassin sees himself as fellow improviser rather than conductor (unsurprisingly, he is sceptical of the term), and such is the elaborate nature of the set-up, that despite its preoccupation with the ephemeral, Phantom Orchestra makes a point of its materiality. ‘There is something extremely tactile here’, he emphasises. ‘The nature of the work means you need to be in the space, in contact with this performance, or you don’t get the experience.’

Crucially, Phantom Orchestra was conceived as both a musical act, and a social one – an act of solidarity with musicians whose livelihoods were under threat. Yassin is proud that he was able to secure enough funding to redistribute it throughout the community. As an extension of the isolation experienced during the pandemic, the atomisation of society increasingly gripped by corporate social media, online echo chambers, and the subsequent rise of the far right are underlying concerns in Yassin’s work. Absence, in this context, is not just a form of sadness, but a condition that is shaping how we relate to one another. Estrangement, as Yassin experiences it in relation to birthplace Beirut and his adopted home Berlin, may be a geographical condition but it is also a psychological one. Yassin’s 2025 release Eternal Ghost deals directly with his feeling of being not just a stranger, but the spectre of a stranger. Alienation from oneself and others is a symptom of this shift to the right, and one of its driving forces.

‘With the extreme violence of the society, the rise of the extreme right wing, the non-care of humanity, the hypocrisy of the West and Western civilisation in particular’, he pauses and repeats the word for emphasis. ‘In particular. Because coming from a Third World country – and I would like to say Third World country because it was made like that with the causes of colonialism – I started to question everything. Very slowly we are losing what we have had as a society and as humans.’ The answer Yassin conjures is community – immune communities, as he calls them – insulated from malign forces that can rebuild connections and bring people together.

As a gathering of ghosts, Phantom Orchestra is Yassin’s contribution – a collective of musicians he can summon into being, that in turn will bring the people who hear it together, in sound, if only for a moment. The people are absent, the sound is disappearing, but we are finally listening. While there are elements here which speak to cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s writing on ghosts and hauntology, not least in the way in which Yassin positions his work in the context of virulent late capitalism and the fraying of social fabric in the West, it is a phrase from another time – Robert Musil’s vast and unfinished meditation on the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, The Man Without Qualities – which I keep returning to when thinking about Yassin’s work. When Clarisse, the wife of protagonist Walter, walks away, Musil notes, ‘nothing of her remained in the room, but her laughter’.

Phantom Orchestra is still at the beginning of its life. The dubplates are still relatively fresh, the grooves not yet worn down by repeated plays, their sounds still not reshaped by changing times. ‘Five years is not a long period’, Yassin reflects, dismayed by how little the world seems to have learned from the experience of the pandemic, and yet convinced that it has left its mark. ‘We were so fragile. For the first time we could, as humans on this planet, feel the same things, sometimes have the same dreams.’ How this collective unconscious will reveal itself in Phantom Orchestra will be indirect, perhaps indistinct, and much will depend on how we choose to hear it.

‘I think the archive is always a living creature, so it’s not something that’s stuck in a period of time’, he concludes. ‘When the times change, points of view change and the political situation and social situation changes, there will be a new meaning for this material, and I think that that’s the important thing.’ I look forward to our next conversation.

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