Owirri 2k: A Sonic Universe

In October 2023, during my fourth year at Multimedia University of Kenya, Boomplay Campus MVP came to campus. I couldn’t choose a cover song from the many I loved, so I did something slightly unhinged for a first attempt, I wrote my own.

It became my first original song performed publicly. I reached the final stage and finished fourth: close enough to see the prizes, but I left with something more important, a dream that suddenly felt possible.

After the competition, people kept asking where they could find my music. At the time, the honest answer was nowhere. So, in November 2023, I released that song as “Muziki Kama Hii” and began my journey as a recording artist.

I had always sung in church, but I had never imagined music as a career. Campus MVP changed that. I felt the decision in my bones before everyone around me understood it. The dream stayed.

Outside music, I am a statistician and data professional with a background in Mathematics and Computer Science. My world includes datasets, patterns, dashboards and the persistent belief that every complicated thing can eventually be understood.

Music and data may appear to live on opposite ends of the brain, but I approach both with the same instinct: look closely, find the pattern and translate it into something people can understand.

One side of me works with evidence. The other works with emotion. Somehow, both are always trying to tell the truth.

My creative work extends beyond building my own career. Through Soul Society, I curate performance spaces, artist conversations and cultural experiences designed to help creatives meet, experiment and be witnessed.

I am interested in what happens when artists have more than a stage. When they also have community, shared knowledge and room to grow.

For me, community-building is not separate from the music. It is part of the same mission: creating the spaces I once needed and opening the door wider for the artists coming beside me.

Before some feelings became songs, they became poems. During campus, I wrote “Unlove You,” a poetry collection published on Wattpad that holds an earlier version of my voice and the emotions I was learning to name.

I also create jewellery through Mi Hermosa Art Sanctuary, turning shells, beads and found details into wearable pieces shaped by identity and personal expression.

Then there is the editorial world. As chief editor at Nairobi City Girls, I help document women, creativity and culture in Nairobi. I am drawn to anything that allows a story to take form, through sound, words, images or something made by hand.