#gq middle east

[medullam]

GQ Magazinze Middle East, ph. Otman Q. [France, 2022]

#otman q #gq middle east #gq magazine #photography #france #2022

[taminoamirfouad]

gq middle east photographed by emil pabon (x)

#what the ever loving fuck tamino #thank you for the link sophaeros! #tamino #emil pabon #gq middle east #photoshoots: gq middle east #photoshoots: 2022 #2022

[dngsicheng]

Man Of The Year Motaz Azaiza - GQ Middle East

#well deserved king 👑 #he deserves the world and more #may Allah bless him #motaz azaiza #gq middle east #gq magazine #gq men of the year #man of the year #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza

[shinee-is-back]

icons

#morocco #yassine bounou #BABIES #achraf hakimi #morocco national team #♥️💕♥️💕♥️💕♥️💕💕💕💕 #gq middle east #gq #football

[luckydiorxoxo]

#imaan hammam #gq Middle East #mario sorrenti #amiri #balenciaga #comme des garçons

[honestmysteries]

Thinking about how Rami has covered 3 different versions of GQ (British, American, & Middle East (twice)). Also I love the articles about him. He’s so thoughtful, intelligent & lovely 😍🥰❤️

#rami malek #ramimalek #rami #gq middle east #british gq #GQ #rami malek is a work of art #rami malek deserves the world #rami malek fan for life #i love him so much

[taminoarticles]

— Tamino for GQ Middle East, September 2022 (x)

Tamino’s Truth

On the brink of a new album and tour, Belgian-Arab singer Tamino Amir is ready to take his career to the next level. But there won’t be room for compromise.

Words Jad Salfiti  Photography  Emil Pabon  Styling Adrien Gras  Groomer Sanne Schoofs  Producer Mercator

STEPPING OFF THE plane and on to the air­craft’s stair­case, the warm air hits Tamino Amir squarely in the face. It’s a famil­iar sign that he’s just arrived back in Om El Donya (the Arabic nick­name for Egypt, mean­ing mother of the world). Blearyeyed from a long-haul flight from Bel­gium, he hands his bur­gundy Bel­gian pass­port to the immig­ra­tion officer. It’s met with silence, and then something strange hap­pens.

Immig­ra­tion officer: “Ana araa laqabak hu fuad. Hal antum eay­ilat Muhar­ram Fouad?”

Tamino: “Sorry, I don’t speak Arabic.”

Immig­ra­tion officer: “Are you related to Muhar­ram Fouad?”

Tamino: “Yeah, he was my grand­father.”

Cue frantic excite­ment as sev­eral secur­ity guards rush to the desk and sur­round the singer, des­per­ate for a photo oppor­tun­ity with the grand­son of the late Muhar­ram Fouad, a titan of Egyp­tian musical cinema’s golden age of the 1960s. Tamino’s creased with laughter as he tells the story from his apart­ment in Ant­werp, but you get the impres­sion that it’s not one-off.

“Even now if we go to Egypt and people know that I’m the grand­son of Muhar­ram Fouad they’re like, ‘Oh, I know all the names of his wives! Then they start nam­ing them all [includ­ing] my Grandma.’”

How many wives did he have?

“Six in total, not at the same time of course, but they only had one kid which seems like a mir­acle. Yeah, one kid: my father.”

Though the musi­cian’s memor­ies of his grand­father are hazy, he had a dir­ect influ­ence on his now bur­geon­ing musical career. As a teen­ager, Tamino even dis­covered his antique res­on­ator gui­tar in the attic of the fam­ily home in Cairo. “The first time I sang through a micro­phone was at my grand­father’s stu­dio. He had one in a house in 6th of Octo­ber city [so-named after the 1972 Arab-Israeli war].”

With so much atten­tion focussed on his grand­father’s leg­acy, you have to won­der whether the shadow ever looms too large on Tamino’s own career. It’s something he’s given thought – and fraught – to.

“I was really scared that maybe the people who would come to my show in Egypt [Tamino’s first there in 2019], would come mainly because I was the grand­son of Muhar­ram Fouad. But it wasn’t the case. Usu­ally they would just say, ‘Oh and by the way, my grandma is such a huge fan of your grand­father’. But they came because they liked my music. It was really cool.”

Today, Tamino is in good form; chatty and smil­ing ear-to-ear. He’s just returned from hol­i­day in Italy (a trip to Mono­poli in Puglia) as well as spend­ing time hanging out and work­ing in New York’s Wil­li­ams­burg and Lower East Side Man­hat­tan. But with a new record and a US and European tour around the corner, things are about to get very busy for the 25-year-old.

Born to a Bel­gian mother and Lebanese-Egyp­tian father, Tamino lived in Cairo until he was three when his par­ents split up. It led to a move to Bel­gium with his brother and mum and has been home ever since. Not that he gave up his roots for Europe. “We’ve vis­ited Egypt many times,” he explains. “I also vis­ited Lebanon once on my own to spend time with my cousin – she also makes music and is super cool.” The cousin he’s refer­ring to is the fledgling singer Tamara Qad­doumi. “She showed me around Beirut and in the moun­tains, too. She actu­ally brought me to a Syr­ian oud teacher there and we had a sort of Arabic singing les­son. He sold me an oud to start prac­ti­cing on.”

He might not speak the lan­guage, but Amir is well-versed in Arabic music. “There’s this one Fairuz album in par­tic­u­lar – it’s actu­ally a reli­gious album,” he says, refer­ring to Good Fri­day East­ern Sac­red Songs, a choral album of 10 hymns recor­ded by the Lebanese legend in a num­ber of Beirut churches between 1962 and 1965. “She’s Chris­tian and it’s such a beau­ti­ful record.”

“Even now if we go to Egypt and people know that I’m the grand­son of Muhar­ram Fouad they’re like, ‘Oh, I know all the names of his wives!’”

Amir’s ven­tures into the Arabic music land­scape, as well as his her­it­age, have undoubtedly impacted the sound of his own music. This, and a new album, are the reason behind today’s Zoom call, and Amir is in poetic mood.

“If you take the meta­phor of a storm,” he starts, “well the storm has passed and we don’t really know what happened dur­ing it. We just see the after­math. Dust particles are in the air and maybe some scratches on the face or whatever. That’s the sort of image I have when I listen to the record,” he’s describ­ing his sopho­more album, Sahar, the fol­low-up to 2018’s Amir recor­ded with the Nagham Zikrayat Orches­tra (many of whom are Iraqi and Syr­ian refugees). “Sahar means just before dawn, it con­jures up this in-between realm. Every­body has had those times where they wake up before every­body else does. It’s not night, but it’s not day either. It’s kind of…limbo.”

The 10-track album is pared down, mid-tempo and reflect­ive baroque rock with Arab-inspired melisma. Unlike his debut, it doesn’t include an accom­pa­ny­ing orches­tra, pla­cing the focus squarely on his voice; a quaver­ing fal­setto that lends itself per­fectly to the darker, intro­spect­ive Arab-gothic moments such as standout track “A Drop of Blood”. The song is a hyp­notic, cres­cendo-build­ing chant which sees Tamino’s voice rise and drop, weav­ing around the pluck, vibra­tion then strum of a clas­sical Arabic oud (which he plays). It will sit com­fort­ably along­side fan-favour­ites like “Habibi”.

“I under­stand for some people that it’s con­fus­ing, because I write these two types of songs,” he says. “Almost like these very typ­ical, Clas­sic West­ern songs or whatever. And then there are these songs inspired by Arabic music, too. To me, they can per­fectly coex­ist on one album, but some people, I think, would rather be like, ‘choose one!’ I can’t. They come as they come.”

Sahar is alto­gether a quieter, more min­imal record than its pre­de­cessor, “We really embraced the subtle ele­ments this time around and we didn’t want to emphas­ise too much on the big­ger things”. The gui­tar-strummed “Cin­na­mon” sounds like a lul­laby. Dreamy. Sul­try. Sunkissed. “Sun­flower” is a duet with Angèle, argu­ably French pop’s biggest star, and sees the artist ven­ture more into elec­tron­ica, it opens moment­ar­ily like a Massive Attack track, with a swell­ing tone and the mur­mur of heav­enly voices, before set­tling into a piano-led folk-rock song. Mean­while, “You Don’t Own Me” is equally rous­ing and mys­tical, as it lightly teases a more exper­i­mental sound. The intro sounds like Revolver-era Beatles as he pairs mon­strously dis­tor­ted voice effects before dis­solv­ing into a more tra­di­tional torch song. It’s refresh­ing to hear Tamino take small strides in build­ing on his sound world, some­times though, there is a sense he could go fur­ther into the avant-garde if he allowed him­self to. No doubt these are songs that will cause minor tremors when per­formed live.

It’s hard to know how Tamino’s new album will be received, but as he pre­pares to set off on tour, one thing is clear: authen­ti­city is cent­ral to what he does, espe­cially when it con­cerns bring­ing together dif­fer­ent musical tra­di­tions. “I think if I tried to [force it] then it becomes gim­micky and then we end up in Alad­din ter­rit­ory” he says laugh­ing.

Get­ting hybrid Arab-inspired Anglo-pop to work is a ter­rific­ally hard under­tak­ing, espe­cially if you want to avoid fall­ing into cliché or musical ori­ent­al­ism. But with loyal audi­ences already clam­our­ing to see him in both the Arab coun­tries and Europe, Tamino is bliss­fully aware that he just needs to keep doing exactly what feels right to him. “If it’s there, I’ll embrace it, you know, and I’ll just let it be. But equally I won’t force it because, really, I just can’t.”

#tamino #tamino amir #gq middle east #article #interview #english #2022 #with photoshoot #original text #read via link

[sinnamonscouture]

Achraf Hakimi Covers GQ Middle East, February 2023

#Achraf Hakimi Covers GQ Middle East February 2023 #fashion #style #model #beauty #achraf hakimi #menswear #gq middle east

[toryorlando11]

Toryorlando91:

Adamu Bulus photographed by Riccardo Dubitante - GQ Middle East April 2023 

#adamu bulus #riccardo dubitante #gq middle east #april 2023

[anyab]

[ID in alt]

Yumna Al-Arashi on Yemen’s Language of Love [link]

Exploring the regional and Yemeni heritage of masculine softness, now at risk of being lost on a generation.

I grew up with images of Yemeni men hand-holding, nose-kissing and, specifically where my family are from in Northern Yemen, the respectful kissing of your parents and grandparents on the knees. In my mind’s eye, this always instilled a softness toward Yemeni men. But I feel that exposure to Western traditions, Hollywood, and prejudice means that these are facets of life slowly being lost within the region.

Yemen’s language of love is communicated with the body. The language of love is spoken with the lips, weaving the Arabic language into a poetry which shakes the soul to its core. In Yemen, the language of love is a head caress on your grandmother’s lap, a dizzying repetition of oudh-traced kisses on every angle of your face. The language of love is your right toes pointed out from under your (dere’), directing the vibration of your curves, low hips wrapped tightly in fabric to accentuate your rhythmic dance. The language of love is your aunts’ tongues beating the sides of their mouths, clapping their henna-covered hands, crying out in high-pitched unison. Yemen’s language of love is not subtle. [...]

#gq middle east #greatly enjoying the articles from the newest issue

[joekeerycentral]

📸 Joe Keery for GQ Middle East (2019)

More Photos

#joe keery #joekeery #joe #keery #stranger things #photoshoot #GQ #GQ middle east #outtakes

[medullam]

Younes Bendjima for GQ Middle East, ph. Gray Sorrenti [Lyon, 2022]

#younes bendjima #gray sorrenti #gq middle east #photography #lyon #2022

[taminoamirfouad]

gq middle east photographed by emil pabon (x)

#omg #tamino #emil pabon #gq middle east #photoshoots: gq middle east #photoshoots: 2022 #2022

[dngsicheng]

look what was in the mail today! ❤️🇵🇸

#finally! #it was worth the shipping costs #motaz #motaz azaiza #gq middle east #gq men of the year #gq magazine #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #gaza

[sapphirecvbzent]

Yassine Bounou for GQ Middle East Magazine February Issue

#bono #sevilla fc #morocco nt #football #dima maghrib #gq middle east

[daily-coloring]

#hiam abbass #gq magazine #gq middle east