— Tamino and Ramy for Knack Focus, 2018 (x)
Tamino & Ramy, Mortsel's most successful brother couple: 'Together we can do nothing bad'
Kristof Dalle 16-10-2018, 14:00 Updated on: 23-04-2022, 08:01
One is 21 and storms the sky with Amir, his debut album. The other is 18 and determines the international image of his brother from his room in Mortsel as a house photographer, director and all-round creative director. Ramy and Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad, Mortsel's most successful family business. "There is both a romantic young soul and a nihilistic old man in me."
“When I was fourteen, I was a bit of an asshole. The classic adolescent rebellion to rebel, especially at school.'
'At school? Especially to me, yes, Tamino. I often asked Mom to send you to boarding school after all. Really very often. Well, it's clearly all worked out.'
Eighteen months after he forced his breakthrough with Habibi and was proclaimed laureate of De Nieuwe Lichting, there is still no measure of Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. Last month he received the Anchor Award for up-and-coming talent together with Faces on TV at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, this week Amir , his debut album, is on the shelves. Mesmerizing listening songs – as usual – peppered with Middle Eastern elements. Younger brother and film student at Sint-Lukas Brussels Ramy – 'Feel free to call him my creative director', says Tamino – provided the artwork and accompanying clips, just as he did for Blackwave , Emma Bale and Portland. Memo: one brother is 21, the other 18.
Say Ramy, you sure like that cameo as a woman, huh? Tamino
'Now that Tamino is really going international, I receive daily emails from America or Australia about artwork or promotional material', says Ramy. 'It was just about posters in the Paris metro. Crazy, if you think about it. Nothing goes on without my approval. I try to keep the overview, so that Tamino doesn't have to worry too much about it. That way he can remain a bit of a dreamy artist.'
Ramy's words whirl through the Antwerp Bar Vert. The eighteen-year-old speaks with the same confidence as his older brother, albeit much more softly and without too much intonation. It's eleven o'clock in the morning, or you would almost think that… 'I choked? Well, I hear that often.' Tamino laughs. “In high school they called him out because he was supposed to be stoned in class every day. Not so. Ramy is just extremely zen.'
Useful. Especially because at the age of eighteen, Ramy already largely controls your international image. You'd get nervous for less.
Ramy Moharam Fouad: (grins) There's a lot of pressure on me, but that's how I like it.
Tamino Moharam Fouad: I know. That also makes me feel less guilty for putting so much burden on your shoulders. We're just a good team.
Ramy: Together we can't make anything bad, I really believe that. We don't give up until it's right.
Has directing always been your calling, Ramy?
Ramy: No. Tamino would be the director, I the actor. I went to drama school from the age of eight to seventeen. Tamino was already writing pieces when he was ten and let me play them. I loved doing that.
Tamino: You just didn't know any better. It's also not that hard to get a six-year-old to play a knight who has to save the world. (laugh)
Ramy: It wasn't until I was fifteen that I became interested in photography – I did the artwork for Tamino's entrance exam at the Conservatory of Amsterdam – and later also in directing. The more behind the scenes documentaries I saw, the more that side of the business started to attract me.
In 2016 you shot the short film Damonia , of which your brother was responsible for a good part of the soundtrack. Damonia deals with dementia. What possesses a young fellow to tackle a theme that is – presumably – very far from his bed?
Ramy: When I first started photography, when I was 15, a friend of Mom's asked me if I wanted to make a series of portraits of her demented grandmother Godelieve as a keepsake. Tough, but I wanted to try. In the end it turned out to be a really nice day. Clear or not, she clearly enjoyed modeling. Her husband was also a photographer, she told me. He was currently in Africa but soon had an exhibition nearby. Her husband had died two years earlier. A day later I received a message from her granddaughter: Godelieve had died that night. I remember that I immediately thought of Damonia like crazyI have begun to write about a woman who longs in vain for her husband's return. That was the first time I felt such a compulsion: I had to tell that story, and photos alone wouldn't get me there.
Today you will also be directing your brother's clips, most recently Persephone's, in which Tamino sings to his beloved as Hades. It is remarkably understated compared to your earlier work.
Ramy: I wanted to portray the Persephone myth quite subtly, since the song is already very heavy and full of symbolism anyway. Although it had to be an intense viewing experience at the same time. For some, it might be too much of a good thing, but hey, so be it.
Tamino: The same goes for the song itself: it asks a lot of the listener. Which essentially gives you free rein for the accompanying clip.
We now know that Tamino works quite uncompromisingly. But apparently it's a family trait?
Tamino: I'm stubborn, but Ramy is at least twice as bad. Which also strikes me as a good quality for an artist. Although it is still a punishment how he cannot be dismissed from his vision at the age of eighteen. Even if that sometimes makes the collaborations very intense.
Do you always pull the same rope on set?
Tamino: We're always on the same side, yes. (…) What are you laughing at now?
Ramy: What about Cigar ? It's true that we're usually on the same page, but in the run-up to that clip he must have invaded my room at least five times. "Hey Ramy, you're sure about my cameo as a woman, aren't you?" "Yes, Tamino." "But really, huh?"
Tamino: I don't mind walking around in women's clothes. But it had to match the rest of the story. And I wanted to be a beautiful woman. (laughs)
Ramy: Come on, Tamino, you really are a beautiful woman.
Come Tamino, you are a beautiful woman. Ramy
Remarkably, that was still an issue in the first place. Last year you told in this magazine how liberating it was to be raised only by your mother and you never had to hide your feminine side, like your falsetto voice.
Tamino: That was also very liberating. And again, I actually really like to show up in women's clothes, but it wasn't supposed to look like a joke. It was also true: we asked the girls in the clip to dress up as nineteenth-century prostitutes, so putting on a skirt was the least I could do.
Ramy: I think I have that feminine in me even more than Tamino. Largely because Mommy raised us alone.
Tamino: You have a certain softness that you could possibly call feminine. But at the same time – if we think in traditional roles – a hardness and stubbornness that is just very masculine.
In the clip of Tummy, Ramy portrays you as a living pharaoh statue. No matter how much you try to wash off the gold paint at night, every morning, ad aeternam you still wake up like a shining pharaoh. A quite literal nod to the exaggerated emphasis on your roots and your grandfather, the famous Egyptian singer Moharam Fouad?
Ramy: That's one of the elements. That clip is a good summary of the record for me. 'Amir' means 'prince' in Arabic. A prince has no choice, he is born that way. The same goes for musicians. You can't run away from who you are.
Tamino: The choice for that pharaoh was of course obvious. It remains very strange, the realization that when people hear that I am a half-Egyptian musician, they still automatically think of pyramids and sphinxes. (dry) There are really very few pyramids in my music. When I think of Egyptian music, it is, for example, a firqa, an extensive Middle Eastern orchestra that includes oud and ney players, the kind my grandfather, or Umm Kulthum, also performed with.
That clip made me feel somewhat sorry for Tamino, who tries little successfully to escape from all the attention. Was that the intended emotion?
Ramy: No. But I do like to hear it .
Tamino: It's been going really fast for me for a year and a half now, but I can't complain about that, can I? This is what I've wanted to do all my life, there's never been another option. At the same time, I understand Tom Waits when he says: 'It's funny how you want to get people's attention. But when you get it, you want people to fuck off.' And I'm not talking about the fans, but about all the noise: the appointments, the promo, the flow of emails...
You did incorporate your grandfather's music into the record.
Tamino: Inne Eysermans of Amatorski set to work with Moharam's music. She took a couple of my grandfather's cassettes, worked on them overnight, and by morning she had thirty wacky new soundscapes ready. I don't understand how she does it at all. Pure wizard. I can only listen to it with my mouth open.
I am also glad that I could be guided by a Brussels firqa. Until then I just had some arrangements in my music program, then suddenly everything fell together. They had previously asked me to perform with them with my grandfather's music. But I really didn't feel ready for that: I don't know Arabic and I'm not schooled in that music at all.
Have you already performed in Egypt?
Tamino: No, and if I ever play there, it won't be obvious. With my legacy.
As the grandson of the Egyptian Frank Sinatra.
Tamino: I am very happy that I could start in a country where hardly anyone knows who Moharam Fouad was. Because even before I can sing a note, the average Egyptian will have formed an image of how I should sound. My father was never able to cash in on his singing career in Egypt: he always remained 'the son of'.
Which song on Amir do you want to work on, Ramy?
Ramy: Chambers. Strong song, sticks and I immediately had a lot of images in my head. Not everyone on the team was a fan of that song, but I was very resolute against it.
Tamino: There's a good clip in that, yes. I draw parallels between relationships and a battlefield, how you can sometimes oppose each other as two armies. 'In your feigned retreat I'll follow blindly in defeat.' Napoleon was also defeated: 'Tiens, the British are on the run? We're going after it!'
Ramy: (smiles) I get goosebumps when he quotes from it. I have that too with Will of This Heart.
A song about how someone dragged you out of a dark period.
Tamino: Something, not someone. Love, and how it can get you out of a deep valley but also make you soar so high that you become vulnerable again. 'No one else could match your flavor.' I would never sing that about a person. (laughter) Be a little realistic. Verses is a love song to someone, in the purest sense, inspired by The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
Together we can do nothing bad, I really believe that. We don't give up until it's right. Ramy Moharam Fouad
The Prophet must be pretty much your favorite book. In the foreword, Gibran's work is described as 'a romantic rebellion in a cold world'. Do you see yourself that way too?
Tamino: I don't so much rebel against a cold world, but rather against my own nihilism. Amir is one big contrast between the romantic and the apathetic. I really want to surrender – 'fuck it, you get everything, you get me completely' – but often I don't feel anything at all. A song like So It Goes is about that, about how you don't seem to notice the beauty around you at all. (thinks) There is both a romantic young soul and a nihilistic old man in me.
Ramy: I recognize it in myself too, although I would call it focus rather than nihilism. When I'm in a flow, I'm anything but social.
Tamino: That's why I haven't changed a bit in the last year. I'm just working, I wouldn't even know where to schedule diva scenes in my calendar. (laugh) In order to get everything done, you have to flatten yourself. I see a lot of artists who struggle with that. Understandable. Artists are not made to flatten themselves.
Is that why you're both up so early? The questionable talent to flatten everything where necessary.
Tamino: No. Nihilism kills everything, it is of little use to you. We owe a lot to Mom, who always left us free to do what we wanted to do. And besides that, Ramy and I just share a certain passion and willingness to sacrifice everything for that. Coming back to Tummy: if you're born with a calling, a talent, or whatever you want to call it, you can't help but feel it. If you're lucky enough that everything falls into place, then you don't let that slip out of your hands, do you? Then you just grow up very quickly.
Ramy: It's a very strange realization, but I haven't really felt like a student for a day. I'm just going with Tamino's rhythm. Fortunately, I can do a lot from my room, while he has to stand on it every day, facing the outside world. (thinks) Everyone says we're old souls.
Tamino: (half admonishing) Ramy, you don't say that about yourself.
Ramy: People say: 'Ramy, you are so young. Enjoy life anyway.' But this is my way of enjoying it. I feel physically bad if I don't get the most out of a day.
I hope to make a feature film someday. I look up to Xavier Dolan, but even harder to Spike Jonze. Ramy Moharam Fouad
Tamino: I have a hard time enjoying the fleeting things. Drinking wine on a terrace? A sun holiday at a swimming pool? Mumps. It's fun at the moment, but it doesn't stop there. Gibran says, "Labour is love made visible." That's right. It gives life meaning.
At eighteen you already have a vision of the direction you want to go, Ramy – if you have to choose?
Ramy: I hope to be able to play a full-length one day. And after a year of mainly video clips, I now really feel the need to work out my own project again.
Tamino: You're a storyteller. While a video clip, just like a song, is at most a sketch. You can never put everything into that.
Ramy: In three minutes I can lose my egg. Clips are also very grateful, because you do get a response. Let's be honest: such a short film is fantastic to make, but you know that you will never reach a large audience with it. I now have to redo my first year at Sint-Lukas – Tamino was my biggest priority this year – but of course I don't regret it for a second. I couldn't imagine a better school.
Reportedly, you mainly look up to Canadian director Xavier Dolan.
Ramy: It's hard not to admire Dolan, isn't it. There are very few directors who have already shot five relevant, intelligent films before the age of twenty-five. Although today I look even more up to Spike Jonze (director of Her and Being John Malkovich, ed.) Dolan's rawer work is very interesting, but I lean more towards Jonze's magical realism, creating a reality within reality. Damonia and my video clips always have such a dreamy atmosphere.
I understand. Jonze also started with video clips. And Jackass of course. I can still see you doing that. Tamino
Tamino: I get it. Jonze also started shooting music videos before shooting great movies. And Jackass of course. I can still see Ramy doing that. (laughs)
Ramy: First we have to make that animation sequence that you came up with. Walking Stick Charlie , about the adventures of a stick insect.
Tamino: Soon someone else will be walking along. But admit it's a good idea? Not least because such a stick insect reduces the animation costs enormously.
