ALÉM 

At the age of three I had recurring dreams of a displacement on foot, along a Mediterranean coastline. Camping on beaches, laying carpets. I never understood them. Then, four decades later, on the Lycian coast of Türkiye with my daughter, I recognised with a shiver the landscape from my dream. I leaned in and tried to write music from the dream and as I played certain maqams, certain chords on the Flamenco guitar, I was both rocked and held by a wave of collective grief and catharsis in the music. And when I sang from this place, the voice was greatly changed.

It took me another year of working like this with the music before my body remembered — like re-assembling a mirror from shards — that the stories of a difficult migration from the East, across the Ottoman Empire and over the ocean, with our carpets and our wagons, had come from my grandmother, as she had whispered to me in private moments the story of our Romani origins.

This album celebrates that epic journey West. The heart of it is my Flamenco guitar, and I’m joined by musicians and instruments from Persia through Armenia, Anatolia, Eastern Europe, France, Portugal and Spain. You will hear ghostly bowed kamancheh and heartbreaking duduk from Armenia, Kurdish fiddle from Iran, ney reed-flute and bağlama from Turkey, accordion and trumpets from the Balkans, Flamenco guitars from France and Spain, and cavaquinho from Portugal.

Through this work I had the incredible fortune to meet the Turkish-Kurdish singer and musician Özcan Ateş, who helped me to find my voice, both in the Turkish language and on the bağlama.

Além means both “further on” and “afterlife” in Portuguese. It recalls both the never-ending journey of our planet’s displaced peoples and its generational transmission.

Além is still a work in progress.

[Release date: April 8, 2027]

SOLEDAD INFINITA [2024]

THE MAGIC BARREL [2026]

A collection of fairground tunes for accordion and hurdy gurdy, recorded between 2002 and 2006. And also an origin story.

In 2002 I was already 30 and doing cabaret in London, when my family revealed I was directly descended from the Victorian contortionist Percy Delevine (great grandfather). I would have appreciated the knowledge a bit sooner—especially during the early years where I was pleading to join the circus. But not to worry. I immediately adopted the name for my act. I added to it, not the name on my birth certificate, but the name my father habitually called me—Ricardo—put up a sign, and went into the family business.