About

My name is Kimwei and I am the Grand Bard of Exeter. I’m a singer-songwriter and protest musician. I believe that the bardic arts (song, story, poetry) are needed more than ever now to build a creative and sustainable future. When you become Bard you take an oath, a commitment to the land and to be creative. The natural result of that commitment is climate activism – it’s the only course of action that makes sense to me. 

As well as writing and performing songs, and words, I lecture in music at Masters (MMus) level with pioneering enterprise AMSonline, and am a lifestyle experimenter and nonbinary trans activist.  In day-time I’m likely teaching online, recording, producing or writing. My lecturing role includes mentoring composition, songwriting, and percussive guitar students and teaching film music. I’ve also written percussive guitar materials for BTEC and songwriting materials for Foundation Degree.

I have been described as an inventive and expressive guitar player, composer and singer, and I like to use every available part of the guitar to make percussive sounds. In 2015 I was featured in three episodes of Guitar Star series 1 (Sky Arts UK).

I approach the guitar in much the same way I approach life – from a different angle. My lifestyle experiments such as only travelling by Fixed Gear bike for a year, living in a yurt, and running out of money on purpose in my self created £0 Challenge are chronicled on my blog/vlog.

As a singer-songwriter I self-released albums of song and solo acoustic albums. The most recent, ‘Nothing’s Binary‘ has been described as “truly original, indefinable, challenging, thought-provoking, poetic and haunting. Beautiful, spiky, intricate and dreamy” (Greg Hancock‘Refraction & Redemption’ is haunting and delicate, with a strong core of hope, bringing light to dark themes (David Healthfield). My music has been featured on Channel 4, BBC Spotlight Oxford, BBC Radio Devon and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s “Friday Lates”.

During summer I usually run workshops at various festivals as part of my Nothing’s Binary project, celebrating the full gender spectrum. See my “Events” page to find out when.