Black Industrial Frequencies: Ain Bailey, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, DeForrest Brown Jr, Trevor Mathison
Black Industrial Research Group (BIRG) convenes a panel of artists working with experimental sound as both material and conceptual tools, examining sonic method and theory through the lens of Black industrial aesthetics.
Doors: 5.45pm
| Dates | Sat 28 Mar 2026 |
| Times | 6pm - 7pm |
| Space | River Rooms, New Wing |
| Price | £5 |
Artists in Residence
Part Of:
An informal collective of artists, musicians, and researchers formed in 2022, BIRG’s principal contributors include Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Gary Stewart, Oliver Fuke, and Trevor Mathison. Through events, exhibitions, and recorded releases, the group traces and reclaims a postcolonial lineage of techno and noise within a loosely defined concept of ‘Black Industrialism’, a term used by artist John Akomfrah and further theorised by writer Kodwo Eshun in relation to Mathison’s sound design for the influential Black Audio Film Collective.
Ahead of Assembly’s closing performances — a pair of new works by Mathison and DeForrest Brown, Jr. — both artists join Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and composer, artist, and DJ Ain Bailey for a conversation at the intersection of electronic music and cultural critique.
Biographies
Ain Bailey
Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London. Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ programme in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. For 2022, Bailey created the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: Our Wedding) for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA and ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany. Bailey’s most recent commission was for FACT Liverpool’s ‘Resolution’ research project, for which she created the installation ‘Four’ (2024). She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Bailey is a 2023 recipient of Awards For Artists from the Paul Hamllyn Foundation, and was shortlisted, together with Camden Arts Centre, for the Freelands Foundation Award. .Forthcoming in 2026 is a solo exhibition with Camden Arts Centre.
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom works across multimedia installation and performance, combining ready-made objects, sculpture, photography sound, archive and self produced moving image to create installations with multi-layered references, highlighting cultural collision. He incorporates snippets of film footage and fragments of sound into works, as well as collaborations with musicians for live improvisation.
DeForrest Brown, Jr.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer, musician, and curator living within the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ /Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His written works focus on a diagnostic exploration of electronic music through considerations of applied metaphilosophy. He has released three albums on Planet Mu that channel the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. Brown’s debut book ‘Assembling a Black Counter Culture’ was released on Primary Information in 2022. In 2023, he co-curated HOPE, an international group exhibition presented by Museion Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen as the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy. He has performed or presented work at the Venice Biennale Musica 2025, HKW, Paris+ par Art Basel, Somerset House, Unsound Festival, Performa, and has also taught courses and lectured at Simon Fraser University, The New School, NYU, Harvard University, Brown University, and Princeton University, among others. Recent collaborations include metanarrative liner notes for Cybotron, Drexciya, and Dopplereffekt developed with Detroit techno pioneers Juan Atkins and Gerald Donald, with Berlin club/record label Tresor.
Trevor Mathison
Trevor Mathison is an artist, composer, and sound designer and recordist. His sonic practice centres on creating fractured, haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music and has featured in over thirty award-winning films. Mathison was a founding member of the cine-cultural artist collective, The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC, 1982-1998), where his body of sonic designs defined and situated the Collective’s film and gallery installations. Mathison has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from Black Audio (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and David Lawson) creating sound design for installations and feature documentaries. Mathison has also founded and been active in a number of other experimental sonic groups – Dubmorphology, Hallucinator and Flow Motion. He has also been a pioneer of sound installation work.