In a world filled with overly aggressive, raw, and energetic music, sometimes we need to slow down and play some calm, soothing, relaxing, and ethereal music that will prompt us to contemplate, meditate, or enjoy fine pieces of sonic artistry. Still, the contemporary music scene is packed with artists and bands who often overly exploit their influences, experiment too much, or tirelessly try to reinvent the same old wheel by offering music that sounds so similar to something greats performed and recorded decades ago. Thankfully, there are artists like Nabil Muquit who do quite the opposite. His music always shines with fresh, unique, innovative, exciting ideas, setting a rock-solid example of how music should sound in 2025. With “Augustina,” his latest piece of work, he’s not only delivering one of the finest instrumental pieces this year, but he continues to break rules and push boundaries of contemporary music. Although this composition serves as a proper continuation of “Kelly Drive / Pistachio,” a double single released in 2024, “Augustina” arrives with many innovations in songwriting, composing, arranging, and producing, demonstrating a natural progression of an already fascinating artist, songwriter, and musician. Sonically, Nabil Muquit combines various approaches, different techniques, and many complementary music genres to illustrate such lush sonic imagery that immediately tackles all the senses. Perhaps downtempo comes to mind first, but you’ll immediately how his latest composition shines with some of the finest elements borrowed from smooth jazz, soul, chillout, synth pop, ambient, and various subgenres of electronic music. He uses all these sonic ingredients as more than necessary enhancements, accentuations, decorations, and other details to uplift his music to an entirely new level while simultaneously remaining loyal to the primary sonic direction. Although “Augustina” carries qualities that meet all the trends in contemporary music production, you’ll still notice a subtle touch of nostalgia lurking around. This track instantly transports you to the mid-eighties to early nineties era, where songs like these ruled the airwaves. Still, Nabil Muquit expertly leans towards modern sound, making this number more suitable for a broader auditorium. Therefore, these experimentations with various approaches, different techniques, and many complementary styles resulted in a fascinating composition that will immediately resonate with anyone who appreciates cleverly assembled and flawlessly performed music.
Perhaps “Augustina” is an instrumental track, but it’s stacked with so many qualities that you’ll not need vocal lines to keep you focused on this track. Nabil Muquit solely relies on his tremendous experience, knowledge, skills, creativity, and talent to keep listeners occupied during each segment by delivering many addictive, hypnotic, irresistible, mesmerizing orchestrations. He lets instruments speak louder than words, emitting pure emotion through every note and beat. Anyone even remotely into songwriting and composing knows that’s a hard task to achieve, but it seems like Nabil Muquit does that with such ease. “Augustina” consists of perfect structure, garnered with many profoundly detailed segments, brilliant ideas, and marvelous orchestrations, carefully and thoughtfully implemented to satisfy even the pickiest listeners. As soon as you press play, you’ll notice how all those instruments gently wrap around your listening apparatus with all those calm melodies, grab you by the collar and guide you through an expansive sonic universe built by one of the finest composers and musicians nowadays. Perhaps these instrumentations might sound minimalistic to the inexperienced ears, but Nabil Muquit crafted an otherworldly, ethereal, fascinating soundscape by merging layers together. Those interplays between main leads, themes, melodies, harmonies, and those subtle sublayers go beyond comprehension so many times. They are solely responsible for why this composition has such a hypnotizing quality that keeps you focused all the time and motivated to spin this fine piece of sonic artistry over and over again. The keys play a significant role here, as they navigate through the mentioned sonic universe with such precision and finesse, offering soulful, passionate, sincere, emotive, and powerful performances rarely heard or seen nowadays. Also, it’s nearly mindblowing how all these layers articulate together without overwhelming each other, proving that Nabil Muquit thought about everything while assembling this track.
Beneath all those luxuriant synth layers, there are equally impressive, vividly hearable, intricate, warm-sounding basslines, lurking around and providing this track with more than necessary heaviness, depth, and clarity while simultaneously binding mentioned instrumentations with rhyhtmic patterns. These low-ends are rich, deep, dense, subtle yet powerful, offering more groove and detail to this song. In the meantime, the expertly arranged, perfectly programmed, well-accentuated, moderate, lo-fi beats, breaks, and other percussive acrobatics keep the remainder of the orchestrations in line while dictating groove and pace. Every hit of the snare, kick of the bass drum, accentuation over hi-hat is more than felt in the mix. It cuts the calm ambiance with even more detail. As you can see, Nabil Muquit thought about everything while writing, composing, arranging, and producing his latest piece of sonic artistry. “Augustina” is a downtempo masterpiece, crafted by an exceptional artist who melds all his experience, knowledge, and talent into tremendous ideas and then paints them sonically with such precision and finesse. This is what a piece of art should sound, and you should immediately place “Augustina” on your music radar, because Nabil Muquit deserves your utmost attention. The composition is available on all streaming platforms. Don’t miss it!
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