Between Departures and Dawn, Tamino Returns to Egypt Anew

Almost a year since our last conversation with Tamino, SceneNoise had the chance to catch up with the Belgian-Egyptian artist once again. In that time, he has traded Europe for New York, written an album steeped with goodbyes and eventual reinvention, and carried it across stages around the world. Now, the cycle brings him back to Egypt, where on October 3rd he will perform in the garden of Cairo’s International Conference Center.

When I ask where he’s calling from, he says Antwerp. “Home?” I respond, and we both laugh at the tangle of the word. It feels fitting: his latest album, 'Every Dawn’s A Mountain' circles precisely this tension, reflecting on the loss of leaving Belgium and the way departures reshaped his sense of identity. 

Most people have journal entries or saved photo albums, but for artists, their different life stages are immortalized, almost as public records. So I asked Tamino which chapter of his life does EDAM carry? “I wrote this about leaving Belgium, the grief of losing a friend, ending a relationship, things burning down, but also growing from that.”  

For someone who has been traveling and touring since his teens, a nomadic sense of home is almost instinct. But leaving the place you were born and raised carries a different weight. He calls Belgium “a golden cage” – a home that shaped him as much as it confined him. What lingers isn’t just the people left behind, but the versions and ideas of self you forged there.

That tension surfaces on EDAM, particularly in Amsterdam, a city where he once studied music and learned to carve out his artistic voice. The track captures the paradox of return: the longing for familiarity – “I still hear your distant siren song / Where I’d race the wind to cross the pond” – colliding with the unease of coming back as someone changed. “Amsterdam is happy to see me / She greets me with a pinch of misery.” It’s the dissonance of a city that knows you intimately, but no longer entirely fits the self you’ve evolved into.

Growing up in the public eye is nothing new for Tamino, but there’s a sense of vulnerability in sharing these inner dilemmas on a world stage, translating private loss into songs that thousands will hear. For him, though, music has always been the safest place to explore those feelings. He laughs as he describes his process: “It mostly entails me boring myself and playing with my instruments and experimenting.” Yet in that tedium lies escape, a way to slip into the world of sound and express what he can’t always say outright. 

Once the songs are released, another challenge begins: performing them night after night. I ask whether revisiting them reopens the wounds they came from, or if it helps him mourn through them. “I don’t return to the time I wrote the song, but more to the emotional space that song creates,” he reflects. What he finds more difficult than the past, however, is the critical voice that sometimes makes him fall out of love with a track. Still, he resists the instinct to recoil from his earlier work, recognising that this same voice sharpens him as an artist. Lately, he and his band have been experimenting with abandoning fixed setlists, letting the songs chosen each night depend on what feels right in the moment. It may not be a permanent approach, but it allows him to grow alongside the music and to encounter each track anew.

In this growth as a person and an artist, the oud, an instrument he remembers from childhood, has become increasingly central to his sound. Last year, Tamino told SceneNoise that while he once approached it with strict reverence for tradition, he has now reached a point where playing feels instinctive, a way to connect with his roots. “It just feels so liberating. It just flows. It connects to the spirit. It truly is the instrument of the soul,” he reflected. That ease is audible in songs like Raven and Dissolve, where the oud isn’t just a flourish of heritage or a nod to tradition, but another voice adding texture and depth to his lyrics.

When I ask if he envisions bringing in more instruments from the region – or even singing in Arabic – he pauses. He admits that, as someone not yet fluent in the language, he feels he wouldn’t be able to inhabit the lyrics as fully as he would want to. “First I want to speak it, then I can sing it,” he says. As for instrumentation, he’s open, but only if it serves the song. For him, authenticity isn’t about ornamentation; it’s about listening closely to what the music itself asks for. 

In a previous conversation with SceneNoise, he mentioned looking forward to more adventures in Egypt. Less than a year later, he’s back again with EDAM. There’s something about the city, he notes, the pull of its restless streets, the noise that never quite dies down, but most importantly, the people. He recalls his last performance at AUC, when voices from the audience called out ‘welcome home’ – a phrase he recognized instantly, even without speaking Arabic. These gestures left him deeply grateful, touched by the warmth with which people embraced him.

Yet this concert isn’t his first return to Cairo this year. Just a few months ago, he was here for an intimate performance at Cinema Radio, sharing the stage with Mustafa the Poet, Daniel Caesar, and Rex Orange County. Having visited often, he took Daniel and Alex through the city on foot, walking from Zamalek all the way to Khan el-Khalili. There’s a certain beauty in returning to Cairo’s crowded streets, the anonymity that only a city can grant, echoes of New York, yet more familiar. And then, over chai, drifting from a nearby radio, came the voice and song of his grandfather, Muharram Fouad. As if the city itself was reminding him of a lineage that quietly threads through every return.

That is why the upcoming concert feels less like another stop on the tour and more like a homecoming. His return to Cairo closes a circle around the very questions of belonging and departure that define EDAM. Yet if this moment feels full circle, it also tilts towards something new. In our previous conversation, Tamino spoke about his life as a pursuit of freedom – a pursuit that still seems to guide him now. With EDAM he finally completes his time under his current label, and with it, the pressures that come with moving through the cycle of touring, recording, and producing on command. What lies ahead now is a breath. A search for space to let the songs arrive on their own terms, and who knows, maybe even root themselves in Cairo.