Tamino's music is a sound geopolitics manual

Many artists are also significant because they belong to a precise place and know how to tell better than others. Others, such as the Belgian-Egyptian musician Tamino-Hamir Moharam Fouad, seem suspended between meridians and parallels, in an indefinite time, with a voice that echoes among the eras. For this reason they do not have a homeland except in the art they have chosen to express themselves.

His music is a sound geopolitics manual, a treatise on cultural diplomacy; His texts a convergence of roots and drifts, a bridge between worlds that often look at each other with distrust; Indeed, they are often in clear war between them. With the depth of a songwriter of the past and the sensitivity of a traveler of the present, Tamino writes simple songs that explore the complex space of memory, desire or loss.

In his new album, Every Dawn's in Mountainhis research has become even more visceral. This work sounds like an attempt to build “a metaphysical altar for what has been lost”, as he himself defines it. The album, born and raised between the city that have been a crossroads of others' stories – New Orleans, Brussels, New York – which reflects on the tension between the permanence and the departure, between the artistic need and the intellectual pleasure of retaining and the moral need to let go. The OUD, ancestral tool that returns like a fil rouge in its production, is more present here than ever, sculpting the sound of songs like Babylon And Sanpakuand bringing us back to an idea of ​​music that is not only listening, but ritual, evocation, the last possible sacred act in a widely desecrated world.

Meeting him, while he fixes us with exhausted eyes and sweet horse sweets still foaming, just subtracted from the entirely sold out at the Rome Music Park, means facing himself on a lucid and kind, layered and direct thought, which reflects on identity, art, city and time with the apparently remote air – yet very human – of those who bear the name of a Mozartian character who was looking for the light and the passage Who has already traveled into many lives.

In his responses to this interview there are some of the principles of his philosophy: the importance of having more homelands, without prejudice to the artistic domicile in music; the perception of time and memory; the awareness that inspiration does not follow linear logics; Faith profound in art as an abstract but universal language, capable of saying what words cannot contain, and to preserve the intimate history of people and peoples, more than any archive.

Photo: Kimberley Ross

Your name is inspired by that of the protagonist of the Magic flute by Mozart. How come?
My mother chose it. When I was a child she sang at work and I have always been a fan. Often they ask me if it's my real name. Thanks to my mother I didn't have to look for an art name: I had always had it.

Been to other Tamino in the real world?
I believe there are a bit in Germany and Austria, for the aforementioned reasons. It also makes me smile that many racing horses are called like me. Often those horses have strange names: Tamino is one of the most pleasant.

Many of your songs explore the theme of the passage of time, decomposed in its paradoxically opposite characteristics of seriousness and transitory. Do you think about time as a physical greatness that takes away something or as a concept that transforms you?
To put it in the most naive way, perhaps silly: from time you always lose something, to take something else. I firmly believe it. The worst advice that they can give you is to never change. If you think about it, even when they give you with the most caring intentions, it is never, in fact, a real encouragement. Do not change, stay who you are forever, not allowing time and experiences to change you means preventing the life of teaching you something. It is crazy. I would not wish anyone that I have not seen for ten years of being perfectly recognizable to my eyes.

The title of your new album, Every Dawn's in Mountainevokes the image of something that stands impressive, a difficult climb. What does this mountain represent for you?
I love the ambiguity of this title. Every day constitutes a struggle and an opportunity. The idea of ​​climbing a mountain is inviting and difficult. It doesn't matter if you don't always be able to reach the summit, because you can try again the next day. Every day, each dawn is a mountain.

Photo: Kimberley Ross

You wrote and produced this album in various corners of the world, each with its energy and history. One of his most significant pieces, Babylonwas played for the first time in Italy. Where were you?
I was inside the Rocca Malatestiana of Cesena, for a small music festival. A different group played every evening. They were a very special place and time.

When can a place influence the music you produce? Do you feel connected to those cities or did the feeling of overcome them prevail in you, traveling through, while you wrote and composed?
For a long time I thought that the place where I worked, in itself, could not have a great influence on my music. But then I understood that I could not affirm it with certainty, for the same reasons that, moreover, they lead you to never know where music really comes from.

Does this also apply when, for a period, do you always write in the same place?
Inspiration is a very strange process. Sometimes you can stay on the guitar for a whole day without taking anything out of it. Other times three songs are born in one morning. To mention Leonard Cohen for the millionth time: if I knew where the good songs come from, I would go there more often.

Is there, however, a city whose weight you feel more?
Moving to New York was a decisive step. For the first time I heard that a place allowed me evidently. There is something in New York that all those who have been warned. It is a ruthless city, which does not seem to be interested in you, only until it begins to enter it. Its influence then becomes undeniable. While I can't say exactly how and how much other cities have influenced me, I am absolute certainty that only New York forced me to question who I was.

What conclusions did you arrive in what you tell like today's Babylon?
New York is so demanding that several musicians I know, after working on us, decided to leave it, precisely because he asked for too much. They did not want to be shaking every day from the head to the feet by that abnormal wave of the city: they preferred more neutral workplaces, in which to arrange more freely than their time. I, on the other hand, of New York I love the fact that you can let them do a part of your work. I am a rather introverted person and I need a city that, as soon as I mention taking a step out of the door, grabs me and no longer leaves me, until it goes back.

Photo: Kimberley Ross

Did you end up living in the neighborhood you prefer?
I live in the East Village. I am too young to know how it was really in the 80s, at the height of its splendor. But many people who, on the other hand, were there, confirm that it is one of the neighborhoods of the city where that era is better preserved. Despite being, as is known, dear; Both for the aesthetics and, at least in part, for the soul, the East Village still makes a lot of old New York.

We are pleased to feel like this, because we often talk about a new cycle of cultural decline in New York.
Those who do it speaks of a superficial aspect and not of the soul of that place, which remains alive even if, of course, it is not untouchable: you can injure it, you could also kill it. But if that soul were not yet alive I am sure that many artists and creatives would not fight strenuously to live there, especially in those improbable or impossible conditions.

After all, let's look around: even the depression of a city like Rome can be a source of inspiration, if only for the challenges it imposes.
This is 100%true. For example in New York, for better or for worse, you can touch the consequences of the apogee of capitalist society. And she does nothing to hide it.

Listening to the new album it is evident that your music is able to capture emotions that the only words cannot completely express. Are there experiences that can only be made through sounds?
This is why I make music. It is a form of communication in which ideas and concepts, which can also be very concrete, find an abstract form. I am convinced that, without this abstraction, emotions, stories and people could not be represented in their essence: they would be two -dimensional. The depth of music expands all these things and, at the same time, preserves them, because others can also know them. This is why music is historically important. It is no coincidence that the first thing we think when we think of a decade of recent history is the corresponding music.

In Babylon Describe a universal symbol of chaos and forfeiture and, together, the possibility of the connection between different worlds. Is producing music for you a solitary experience or shared creation?
I think it is feeling alone in participating in something collective. Of course, the concept of Babylon city is preceding in New York: it is a social volcano that could be about to erupt everywhere. It would not make sense to experience places like this without getting involved by others, trying to completely separate from the context. But they are my eyes that observe all this, and they are eyes different from all the others, not only because in the specification of New York Babylon are an outsider, but because all the eyes are different.

Photo: Kimberley Ross

Your work and the same tools that sound seem to combine different cultures, stories and traditions. In a world that often emphasizes division, do you think art has the power to dissolve the boundaries or simply exposes the ways in which we are already connected?
Ideologically I tend to the second option. The beauty of humanity, since we trade, since we travel, since we migrate, lives in the way its parts influence each other. In particular, then, in music, all the boundaries that we place or are placed are fictitious. It is true that there are cultural differences but, higher than all these possible differences, there is a universal dimension that is able to highlight it and to cancel them.

If you could play your song to a character from the past, even remote, which song would it be and who would you dedicate it?
I wonder who might be interested … perhaps, simply, my grandfather (The Egyptian singer and actor Muharram Fouad, NDA). I'd love to still be here. He was the only one in my family to have had a life similar to mine. Music was his life, he had started from a very young age. The song would simply be Babylonfrom the new album. It may seem like a obvious answer but that song and the size that evokes, for me, have a very personal and familiar meaning. Who knows if, listening to it, would it exclaim: “Is this my offspring?”.