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Balamii presents summer series of events at Horniman Museum

The events are part of 696 Festival, a summer-long celebration of Black British music in south London

Balamii are presenting a series of summer events at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill.

The events are part of 696 Festival, a festival celebrating and centring Black British music in South London.

Balamii’s four events will take place weekly across August and will be free to attend.

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Steam Down and RADA will perform together, followed by Lex Amor and Demae, Goya Gumbani and The Colours That Rise, and finally Joe Armon-Jones and Lynda Dawn.

From Afrofuturist hip hop to jazz and soul, the events are intended to showcase the best that south London has to offer.

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The festival is named after Form 696; created in 2005 by the Metropolitan police, it was a risk-assessment document that required club promoters to detail the style of music that was going to be played at their night and the clientele that would attend it, including their ethnicity. It was criticised for the racism that it enabled in its implementation, and was abolished in 2017 by Sadiq Khan.

The festival instead celebrates Black British music genres that through the years have been unfairly targeted by legislative bias.

See below for a full programme of Balamii’s events, and click here for ticketing details.

Steam Down and RADA - 5 August Lex Amor and Demae - 12 August Goya Gumbani and The Colours That Rise - 19 August Joe Armon-Jones and Lynda Dawn - 26 August

Jemima Skala is Mixmag’s Weekend Editor. Follow her on Twitter

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