\u201cI can\u2019t run from my village and the sounds I heard growing up. It\u2019s like they silently haunt me and every time I pick up my guitar to write, I am reimagining and recreating those worlds. Folklore is about identity and since my songs are mostly about stories that involve people, both alive and dead, I believe it shows up\u2026 in the melodies, in the history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in 1995 in Tshilapfene, a small village outside of Thohoyandou, and raised by his grandmother, Muneyi only picked up a guitar for the first time in 2014. In these lilting, acoustic strings, he immediately found a home for his stories and his thoughts on life, expressed in his mother-tongue Tshivenda.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy childhood felt simple and complete,\u201d Muneyi tells me. \u201cIt was mostly me and my grandmother. She was always humming something, something poetic at that. There\u2019s a way in which Venda people live that city people can\u2019t quite understand, and only after I left did I realise that I wanted to write about the village\u2026 about its way of doing things, about the in between.\u201d<\/p>\n Muneyi\u2019s songs are deeply spiritual, tinged by a reflective tone that commands absolute vulnerability. He sings about the nature of love and loss and life, through the lens of personal reflection, and the result is graceful.<\/p>\n Graceful is perhaps the best word to use when speaking about Muneyi. Grace in both the divine sense of the word, and also in the elegance, the poise, with which he writes.<\/p>\n His 2021 debut album \u2013 Makhulu<\/em> \u2013 is a collision of worlds. Melodies are simple and honest, no doubt a quality taken from the sounds of traditional folk, yet compositions are also complex and colourful, tinged at times by loud, exuberant instrumentation.<\/p>\n In his follow up EP, for the boys I like<\/em>, there are tones of jazz and soul, even subtle hints of old-school R&B, bringing with them a contemporary proclivity.<\/p>\n \n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/texxandthecity.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/c-7.jpg?resize=683%2C1024&ssl=1\")
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