“Reminiscing,” a love-gone-wrong song in avant-garde pop, is a great introduction to the 15 tracks that the artist Muashall has released this year.
Avant-garde pop is a term that applies, so far, only to Muashall.
In “Reminiscing,” it manifests in a tinkling piano intro to a forlorn lover, remembering his lover. A strong solo guitar ushers in the memories.
You played guitar but wouldn't sing
The fear that I could be judging
But I was simply enjoying
The muscle on
Your brow when you are concentrating
And embracing the mistakes
All the ones you meant to make
“This is very much a song directed at one particular person who I was thinking about the entire time.”
It is like all such songs in that every listener is free to make his or her own story out of it, or make it match his or her own story. Muashall says “maybe people love to eavesdrop.”
Where it is not like all such songs is the consideration Muashall brings to melding the music, the instrumentation and his voice to his feeling of the line he is singing. He writes all his music and lyrics and handles the mixing and production.
In “Reminiscing,” he said, “I was really curious about having just one acoustic guitar really carry a chorus, carry a hook. It’s not something I had really played with before, but I wanted one acoustic guitar to feel really big.”
The guitar was the musical hook and the lead role, “And I really liked how I accomplished it,” he said.
“Because leading up to the first chorus, I have a bunch of added, more elaborate voice-leading with bowed strings, and there’s little surprises in the musical landscape that have this huge build up. And then I kind of cleansed it all with this big, single solo guitar.”
A friend of Muashall’s, “a longtime musician who has perfect ears” who listens to all his music before he releases it, came up with the term “avant-garde pop.”
“We were trying for the longest time to pinpoint what genre my songs fall into.”
His music background began with piano lessons and classical and neoclassical music, yet he was raised to believe that “sophistication is the antithesis of entertainment.
“I think it’s pop in that I like it to be accessible, and I want it to be somewhat sensational, and I like creating the sensation and maybe pleasure and big feelings. But I feel that even if you’re making a labyrinth, you can still invite anyone along with that, and you can still find that line where you do some interesting things and make a statement about who you are.”
He and his friend were thinking about other artists who do crazy things on mixes and “create landscapes where the record has its own life.”
“The song is one thing on paper, the music’s one thing, and then the record just feels like a totally different thing,” he said.
“Avant-garde,” coupled with “pop,’ thus becomes, in the Muashall context, a term of art for playing with music rather than an elitist expression of sophistication.
“Right,” he said. “Because the song could work. If you just sat down on either piano or guitar and strum the chords — and the chords aren’t that fancy, I usually stick with three or four chord loops — but there’s still so much room to explore. You can voice-lead in interesting ways that make the same four chords feel like completely new territory. But what I love is that you could still play just the block chords and sing the song to yourself if you sat down at a piano. It’s having both of those things available.”
His voice — the “accented vocals” aspect of avant-garde — is another instrument, both in his singing and in the electronics of his production.
A constant consideration is how to mix his voice to fit the song, the lyrics, the music, the feeling. Many situations, he said, need a processed sound, but the danger is “draining the life from the voice.”
Before he began putting out music professionally in 2022, Muashall was, and is still, a model, a career he kind of fell into when some photos from early jobs — before he even signed as a model — went viral.
His advance into music is more intentional. He graduated college in 2021 with a degree in film production.
“I hit the real world and, you know, had to take a long, hard look at what it is I want to do, not just what my image should be. There’s the image of your life, but then there’s what you spend your time on every day.”
And what does he spend time on every day now?
“It’s in the studio,” he said. Making music.
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