Mashoor from Qasr by Sheherazaad

Her alluring debut single for Erased Tapes, Mashoor speaks to the glamour as well as the dis-ease surrounding the experience of fame. The song is also a larger commentary on the values we are fostering as a world society, where particular people, institutions, or countries are celebrated, despite being inherently narcissistic and perverted.

Sheher’s melismatic vocals emerge like a wisp of smoke on ‘Mashoor’ (“Famous), billowing through the earthy acoustic guitar of Ria Modak, lending the song an almost religious quality. But ‘Mashoor’ is in fact a rumination on the pitfalls of a society obsessed with fame and narcissism.

The video for Mashoor was filmed throughout New York City during extreme temperatures. It seeks to visually evoke the dissonance of worlds colliding – brown limbs and gaze projected onto a steely urban labyrinth, and it attempts to forge a kind of fantastical nostalgia around the South Asian immigrant story within America’s historical fabric.

Sheherazaad is an American performer-composer, whose contemporary folk-pop synthesis joins the new wave of South Asian diasporic soundscapes.

Sheherazaad gleans from Western classical and South Asian sonic lineages.

Her contemporary voicing, though inherently genre-defiant, may be described as alternative folk or experimental ballad.