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 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]