Allen Temple & Moussa Dembele

Belgium

Allen Temple & Moussa Dembele – Artist Biography

Allen Temple is a singer-songwriter from the medieval town of Ghent in Belgium, whose music carries the quiet depth of lived experience and a contemplative calm rooted in Celtic tradition. With a father from Teesdale in the north of England, Temple has long felt a deep ancestral pull toward the British Isles. In his early twenties, he followed that call to the west coast of Ireland, settling in Galway. One impromptu overnight sailing trip from the Claddagh to Inverin became a kind of initiation — an elemental encounter with the dark Atlantic and the ancient spirit of the sea. Reverence for that memory continues to shape his musical voice: gentle, poetic, and deeply attuned to place.

After time spent in the Loire Valley practising zen meditation, and later, a transformative period spent alone in a stone tower in Brittany overlooking the Baie d’Audierne, Temple began to articulate a vision that combined stillness, story, and soul. “One bright summer’s day, as I sat looking out over the glistening waves, a deep sense of place came over me,” he says. “I felt sudden awe for this ancient sea that has woven together our destinies. I knew I wanted to honour that connection in music.”

This sensibility runs through all of Temple’s work. His 2024 debut album Anam na Mara (“Soul of the Sea”), though not the central focus of his current project, stands as a testament to his artistic integrity — a quiet yet powerful cycle of five original songs and four 16th-century ballads, supported by a stellar ensemble including percussionist Robbe Kieckens, flutist Stefan Bracaval, cellist Eline Duerinck and hauntingly beautiful backing vocals by Marie de Graeve, Naomi Sijmons, Fedia Mohamed Holail, and Anouk Turnock. The record was produced by Fre Seghers and mastered by Uwe Teichert (Nick Cave, St. Germain), and received glowing reviews and 17 weeks of airplay across Belgium, Ireland, and the UK.

But it is Temple’s recent collaboration with Moussa Dembele, the celebrated multi-instrumentalist from Burkina Faso, that has sparked a remarkable new chapter — one born not from long planning, but from artistic instinct and shared resonance. The two met in Ghent in 2025, and quickly began performing together. Their sound is intimate, hypnotic, and immediate — a weaving of Temple’s fingerpicked guitar and hushed vocals with the luminous shimmer of Dembele’s Mandinge kora.

Dembele first came to prominence with Les Banquets Nomades, a boundary-pushing ensemble blending jazz, folk, and West African percussion. His voice and balafon work stood out — raw, rhythmic, and steeped in memory. That same drive fuels Kokoura, his project with Moussé Dramé and brother Adama Dembélé. Grounded in West African tradition, their sound moves through funk, jazz, and Afro-fusion into new European terrain. Moussa's collaborations span youth theatre Larf!, Terry Riley’s In C, the Konkoba Dundun Ensemble, and the Yelemani Trio. Throughout all this, what defines Dembele is not simply mastery of the balafon, kora, ngoni, or djembé, but a kind of sonic empathy — an ability to listen deeply, respond instinctively,

This collaboration between Allen Temple and Moussa Dembele is a conversation between sensibilities: one rooted in Celtic lyricism and meditation, the other in polyrhythmic trance and storytelling. What unites them is a shared reverence for slowness, for ancestral connection and for crafting beauty with humility and grace. Together, their gentle songs drift and glisten, with the rhythmic groove of Allen’s fingerpicked guitar and the shimmering threads of Moussa’s kora weaving spells of luminous, transcendent beauty. The energy is palpable. Despite its recent origins, this collaboration carries the force of something fated — a convergence of paths shaped by the sea, silence, exile, and return. Audiences are already responding. “He’s got what it takes,” says Steve Wickham of The Waterboys. “Anam na Mara is gorgeous,” adds Luka Bloom. And Louise Rhodes of Lamb simply calls Allen’s work “Genius.”
In an era of speed and saturation, Temple and Dembele offer something rare: music that listens back, music that connects across continents, music that invites us to breathe, to move, to remember. This is kinship, rediscovered.