As part of Always, Already There, the Barbican’s new Afrodiasporic avant-garde festival, Time Echoes arrives as an invitation to listen differently: to hear the past and present speaking to each other through circuitry, breath, bow, and vibration.
Running across the Barbican and Guildhall School of Music & Drama from 23–25 October 2026, Always, Already There is being presented as the first-ever UK festival dedicated to experimental music by artists of African heritage. It centres a body of work that has long been innovative, radical, and expansive—yet too often excluded from the contemporary music space, or constrained by assumptions about where Black composers “belong.”
On Saturday 24 October 2026 at 14:30, Silk Street Music Hall becomes the site of one of the festival’s most ear-opening encounters.
Time Echoes is described as a celebration of Afrodiasporic composers—past and present—who have explored the charged relationship between live instrumental performance and electronic music. But the word “celebration” here doesn’t mean easy listening. It means attention. It means recognising how experimentation becomes a form of survival, imagination, and world-building.
This concert asks audiences not only to hear the interaction between human and machine, but to feel what that interaction can make possible—new textures, new structures, new emotional climates. It draws from what the programme frames as Black radical tradition, and from the idea that these sounds “seek out a worlding between human and nonhuman entities through an endless capacity for reconfiguration… to materialize worlds outside the locked grooves of anti-Black violence and environmental destruction.” (Henry Ivry)
In other words: this isn’t electronics as novelty. It’s electronics as language. As resistance. As possibility.
Time Echoes features four standout soloists: leading clarinettist Heather Roche, cellist Elliott Bailey, flautist Lara Aisha Ali, and Norwegian-based violist Laura M. B. Kumwenda. Together, they bring the programme to life through five UK premieres, placing today’s voices in conversation with electronic music pioneers.
The concert includes work by Moroccan composer Ahmed Essyad and US composer Olly Wilson, alongside pieces by Ivan Liuzzo (pictured), Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, Pamela Z, Allison Loggins-Hull, and Marcos Balter—a line-up that underscores the festival’s core message: Afrodiasporic experimental music is not one story, one method, or one aesthetic. It is plural, and it is evolving.
For further information, please visit the Barbican website.
Images provided courtesy of the Barbican
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