On September 3rd, the historic Curzon Cinema in Clevedon will host a special evening as Clevedon Live Music launches its Amplify Festival with Muco, a British-Burundian singer, songwriter, and composer.
Muco possesses a magnetic ability to make 21st-century audiences fall deeply in love with 700-year-old songs. Immersing yourself in Muco’s music pulls you into a deeply atmospheric, timeless space. He stitches together medieval English folk songs, ancient poetry, and East African zither melodies, creating a sound that feels soulful, intimate, and profoundly human.
Clevedon is a town that values history, storytelling, and the arts, so Muco’s visit feels especially fitting.
Growing up in a British Burundian household, Muco was surrounded by an eclectic and vibrant mix of music. His mother filled their home with the iconic voices of African artists like Miriam Makeba and Khadja Nin, as well as the traditional Burundian folk songs she loved as a child. To this day, the Kirundi and Swahili lullabies his mother taught him remain some of his absolute favourite songs to sing.
Muco plays several instruments, including the autoharp and the 13-string Japanese koto, but his primary instrument, the inanga, holds a special significance. This traditional East African trough zither carries deep roots in Burundian culture and remains the instrument that feels most like home to him. His mother gave him his first inanga, passing down cherished family history along with it. She shared vivid stories of his great-grandfather’s remarkable skill with the strings. While his mother grew up in the city, his great-grandfather lived out in the Burundian countryside, making his occasional visits to Bujumbura feel like a true gift. The family treated the patriarch like royalty; he always stepped out wearing a sharp suit and a hat, carrying his signature walking stick. Whenever he sat before the family to play the inanga, a deep silence filled the room. He also possessed a natural talent for storytelling, constantly spinning long, captivating tales overflowing with wisdom and humour.
Muco often recalls the profound impact of the inanga, particularly when played alongside a captivating style of whisper singing. “The lyrics, telling a story, are whispered while playing the inanga,” Muco shares. “It gives the effect of the instrument speaking. I always found it deeply mysterious and enchanting”.
When Muco expressed his desire to learn the instrument himself, his mother beamed with pride. She tracked down an inanga maker in Kigali, connected the two of them, and offered unwavering encouragement every step of the way. Today, Muco remains deeply grateful for her endless support.
Meanwhile, his father brought a completely different energy into the house. A passionate lover of jazz, his father filled the family home with the sounds of John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie. His father was also a flautist; some of Muco’s earliest and fondest memories are of standing in the garden, listening to his dad playing along to a jazz CD, the notes drifting down from a second floor window. While this early exposure to jazz was highly influential, it was an album by the Bulgarian Female Vocal Choir from his father’s collection that truly struck a chord. Hearing those beautiful, complex harmonies for the first time sparked an enduring love for vocal music.
Beyond melody, his family gifted him a profound appreciation for storytelling. With a writer for a father and grandparents who were poets, and a mother who was a poet, language was always revered in their home. He remembers his aunt helping him memorise Shakespearean sonnets and verses from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when he was just a child. Looking back, these moments were deeply formative; he has his family to thank for his love of words, which has made the exploration of language a vital cornerstone of the music he creates today.
FACES of Clevedon recently caught up with Muco to discuss his upcoming performance, his dual heritage, and the artistic journey that shaped his unique sound.
Finding the Inanga and Bridging the Gap
Navigating his dual heritage during his youth initially presented emotional challenges for Muco. Before he began making music, these two distinct parts of his heritage often felt distant and disconnected.
“I felt caught between worlds, which can be a lonely place,” Muco admitted. “Finding a way to bring them together musically is a way of uniting these parts of myself. I realise now they were never as far apart as I thought.”
Muco continues to draw on that exact feeling when writing music today, finding himself drawn to the beauty that exists in the space between worlds. He hopes to tell stories that help others unite the different, disparate worlds within themselves. “I have both African and European traditions within me and my music, and by exploring the meeting point between them, I hope to express who I am, and how beautiful and meaningful cross-cultural expression can be,” he notes.
Creative Troubadourism
Muco describes his overall artistic approach as “creative troubadourism”. He shows no interest in dry, academic preservation, nor does he want to keep historical music locked away behind glass like a museum exhibit. “These are voices from the past but living through us. They are singing about our lives too,” he explains. Instead, he treats ancient text as a living, breathing art form, deliberately reimagining it for the present moment. “My curiosity lies in what the voices of the past can mean to the living. The only way to truly hear them is to let them pass through me and let their stories interact with my own life and experiences.”
He discovered striking parallels between his two musical traditions. In Kirundi culture, traditional stories and proverbs go by the name ‘imigani’. Successive generations pass these tales down orally, often accompanied by the inanga, telling them around the fire or narrating them to kings and queens in grand palaces.
Muco sees a direct reflection of this practice in the court musicians of the medieval world: the bards, troubadours, and scops. “Their tales feature some of the same characters: brave warriors, travellers, wise people, and themes of conflict and resolution, change and cultural memory,” he explained.
While medieval musicians originally performed Old English poetry musically, only the words survive today. The inanga, however, remains a living tradition. By bringing these two worlds together, Muco hopes his work highlights the universal nature of oral storytelling traditions and demonstrates how they can work together to build something vivid.
This blending of traditions also expands his view of modern storytelling. “Storytellers are embodiments of cultural memory. That is why incorporating both sides of my heritage is so important to me,” Muco asserts, warning that viewing the world through a singular lens limits our ideas of who gets to tell our stories and how.
He deliberately bases his interpretations of Old English poetry around the familiar rhythms of East African folk songs. Old English inherently possesses a rhythmic, musical quality, largely due to its wonderful alliteration, giving the poetry a rolling percussiveness. This sound strongly reminds Muco of ‘Kwivuga amazina’, a specific style of Burundian folk song.
“Performers pronounce long rap like sequences of praise poetry, each line melting and flowing into the next,” he noted, describing the Burundian style. “To me, it sounds like the ocean. I try to emulate these rolling verses in my singing, by letting the lines roll together and undulating the way I phrase things and the emphasis I put on certain words.”
This shared reliance on musical modes and repeated melodic patterns allows Muco to seamlessly weave the two traditions together. Through his overarching project, Book of Voices, and EPs like Soþlice and Summer Crossing, he fluently blends lyrics in Old English, Middle English, Modern English, French, Swahili, and Kirundi.
In one particularly moving piece, he combines a traditional Burundian lullaby with a medieval English lullaby, moving back and forth between Middle English and Kirundi over a beautiful Burundian melody. It serves as a gentle, vital reminder that across every continent and era, human beings constantly sing about the exact same core emotional truths: love, sorrow, nature, and longing. This deep attention to emotional truth carries directly into the atmosphere he creates around his music
The Atmosphere of the Solitary Walk
In a world that often feels relentlessly noisy and machine like, Muco’s performances carve out a rare space of calm, carrying his listeners into the same emotional landscape that shapes his music. Muco frequently features ambient sounds recorded directly in nature within his songs, capturing the soft rustle of wind through leaves, distant birdsong, and the subtle pulse of the open countryside.
Whether taking long walks through places like Studland Woods in Dorset or sitting undisturbed outdoors, he always carries his zithers into nature to record. For his project Summer Crossing, he wove those exact ambient sounds directly into the final tracks.
His repertoire ranges from the heartbreak of Mirie It Is, a forlorn Middle English song lamenting the arrival of winter’s chill, to his absolute favourite piece, Bryd One Brere (“Bird on a Briar”). He feels the soaring melody of the latter perfectly captures the precise sensation of love in flight. He also crafts completely original compositions, such as Old Eagle Weeping, a heartfelt tribute to the Burundian herders who played the inanga softly to calm their cows during the evening.
When performing live, Muco prioritises setting a vivid scene for his audience. He wants listeners to inhabit the ancient poetry right alongside him.
“The key is atmosphere,” he emphasised. “Even without knowing the meaning of every word, I know if I stay present in the story and it is vivid to me and I am expressing that feeling through the music, people will understand. Although the language is foreign sounding, the emotions within are incredibly familiar. Love, loss, decay, change, loneliness, it’s all there.”
For audiences in Clevedon, this immersive environment will feel especially resonant; it mirrors the reflective, coastal tranquillity that surrounds the town itself.
Collaboration and Capturing the Unearthly
Muco’s collaborative spirit significantly shapes his musical output. His single Garden in the Sky boldly explores the human longing for paradise. He drew inspiration from his childhood fascination with symbolism, recalling a giant dictionary of symbols he loved to read.
“The symbolism of gardens was an entry I read over and over again,” he recalled. “I was captivated by how the idea of a garden captures this very human question: Where are we between wildness and cultivation, the womb and paradise?”
To bring this concept to life, he collaborated with Arun Thavasothy on guitar and Christopher Eiesland-Birch on cello. Thavasothy wrote a glittering, otherworldly guitar part that captivated Muco, evoking the image of something hovering blindly in the sunlit sky. Eiesland-Birch, a frequent collaborator both live and in the studio, provided dense layers of cello that gave the piece a rich, earthy feeling, representing the garden itself.
Mythmaking Through Music
Thavasothy also ranks as Muco’s oldest musical collaborator. “We have a shared love for music which crafts a complete world, which you can step into and get lost in,” Muco explains. Together, they worked on an earlier project, Notebook (blue), crafting songs vivid enough to serve as appropriate settings for vast mythological tales. For the track Saga, they set out to tell the story of the Laxdæla saga, a 13th century Icelandic tale of vying generations, revenge, and atonement, which demanded a deeply layered and haunting musical home.
Singing Madly into the Wind Recently, Muco embraced a new role as a ‘Bard in Residence’ for Ffern, embarking on two incredible projects. The first, The Wanderer, involved interpreting a 10th-century Old English elegy about a warrior who loses his home and family, forcing him to roam the solitary sea roads forever.
He travelled to the Isle of Wight to film the videos, utilising the beautiful, dramatic setting of St Catherine’s Oratory, a 14th-century medieval lighthouse.
“The wind almost blew me and the crew off the hillside,” he laughed, remembering the shoot. “But I never felt more connected to the poem than sitting there with the lighthouse behind me and the sea in front of me, singing madly into the wind.”
This past summer, he recorded a second series based on Gawain and the Green Knight, a story he has loved since childhood. He recorded this piece at St Luke’s Chapel on the Dorset coast, a spiritual, nature overtaken location that closely resembles the poem’s description of the Green Chapel. The half-crumbled, vine-covered setting felt so authentic that Muco found himself constantly checking over his shoulder, half-expecting the Green Knight to appear.
Looking Forward
As Muco prepares for his Curzon Cinema debut, he continues to draw inspiration from an array of artists and writers. He recently read Laurie Lee’s memoir I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, finding deep resonance in the author’s description of rambling around a lost world with only a violin. He also heavily listens to Japanese singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba‘s latest album Luminescent Creatures and Clannad’s Magic Ring.
Beyond the Clevedon Literary Festival, September brings a tour alongside Liana Flores, an artist whose songs he has adored for a long time. He is also currently finalising his very first full album. “These new songs are me trying to take my influences from myth and folklore even further,” he revealed. “I’ve written medieval love songs, Old English riddles, and Burundian prayers but about my own life.”
When Muco takes the stage in Clevedon on September 4th, the event promises an evening as soothing as it is profound. His performance invites audiences to slow down, lean in, and experience storytelling in its purest form, something that feels deeply at home in a town shaped by history, creativity, and the quiet stillness of the coast. For a literary festival centred on the enduring power of words and narrative, the organisers could hardly choose a more fitting launch. Through his remarkable voice, his sweeping zithers, and his reverence for the past, Muco reminds everyone that no matter how many centuries lie between then and now, the human story remains one we all share, including here in Clevedon.