Sahar Tamino

• 1 The Longing 04:42
• 2 The Flame 04:27
• 3 You Don't Own Me 04:20
• 4 Fascination 04:29
• 5 Sunflower 04:23
• 6 The First Disciple 06:02
• 7 Cinnamon 02:50
• 8 Only Our Love 03:50
• 9 A Drop Of Blood 05:05
• 10 My Dearest Friend And Enemy 04:32
• Total Runtime 44:40

Info for Sahar

Tamino is back with his second album "Sahar" - in German "Dämmerung".

The Belgian-Egyptian singer first came to the guitar as a teenager, when he found a rare resonator guitar in the attic of his late grandfather - the Egyptian actor and musician Muharram Fouad, who became known as "The Voice of the Nile". Today he plays it together with the oud - creating a double bridge to his cultural past, ultimately to understand and articulate his emotional present. And when Tamino sings of mystery and wonder, romance and devotion, sorrow and hope, you sense that he has been to these places and returned to share what he has experienced in a voice that is as strong as it is tender and as captivating as it is comforting. This is exactly how "Sahar" - his captivating second album - sounds, as if Tamino had been born to sing these songs.

Tamino

Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad
Every classically trained pop musician has travelled a route that began with musical orthodoxy, discipline, structure and attainment, and then, in the embracing of pop's far less formal yet still time-honoured traditions, involved both an un-learning – the best pop music should surely be, and is, about breaking rules, not sticking to them – and a fidelity to the sounds and textures they were immersed in as children and adolescents. Artists such as St Vincent, Joanna Newsom, The National's Dessner brothers, Laura Mvula, Matt Bellamy of Muse, Agnes Obel, James Blake, Susanne Sundfor, Jeff Buckley and Julia Holter all managed that transition seamlessly: they stepped across to the "other side", as it were, and established storied reputations in their adopted field. Crucially, in doing so, they kept, too, a firm grip on the musical touchstones that first led them to devote their lives to creativity.

To that illustrious list can now be added a new name. Of Belgian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage, the 21-year-old musician Tamino's British debut single is a song of such startling, visceral, sit-up-and-listen power, it is as if the singer has arrived, out of nowhere, fully formed. Habibi (Arabic for "my love" or "beloved") is one of those songs that makes a mockery of questions of era and genre. Aptly, from a musician whose upbringing and trans-nationality elude narrow questions of provenance and pigeonholes, it is at once ancient and modern, conjuring, in its portrayal of a love that is majestic but doomed, the romantic decadence of Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and the scorched-earth, ripped-from-the-heart poetry of Nick Cave. Musically, it is, like so much pop today, all over the place, uncategorisable, gloriously impervious to considerations of style, fashion and commerce. In that sense, it is totally now. At the same time, there is something so other-worldly, so defiantly individualistic, about Tamino's songwriting, his octave-traversing voice and ethereal falsetto that attempting to categorise them, or him, quickly seems futile.

This album contains no booklet.