The Process: Are drums a time-travelling device?

Somerset House Studios artist Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom reimagines the drums as a time-travelling device across continent, history, and bodies.

A visual artist who has been learning the drums as part of an art project since 2020, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom has long been interested in how we might reframe our perception of the drums. Its primal release of sound and movement. An ability to shape and reshape our sense of time. But what happens if we take it one step further and reimagine the drum kit as a time-travelling device?

In this episode of The Process, Boakye-Yiadom explores the often-invisible histories of the drum, from being othered and dismissed as noise, rather than music, to sounding the resistance against colonial power. Why is it that drummers like Clyde Stubblefield – the most sampled drummer of all time – are often neglected in music history? And who decides what is visible?

To unpack these questions, Boakye-Yiadom speaks to British Italian multi-genre drummer, percussionist and composer, Valentina Magaletti, and writer and musicologist, Matt Brennan, author of A Social History of the Drum Kit.

Boakye-Yiadom works across a multi-disciplinary practice, creating installations where the mediums are ever-evolving, and constantly in conversation with each other.

He joined the Studios community in 2023, as the inaugural recipient of the Donna Lynas Residency, supported by Modern Art Oxford, Somerset House Studios, South London Gallery and Wysing Arts Centre, receiving a salary for three years and the support of each partner, including mentoring, use of facilities and inclusion in public programmes.
 
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The Process is an artist-led podcast series, developed by Somerset House, which explores the new ideas, big questions and surprising tangents which emerge from the artistic process.

Drawing on the creative community both on site at Somerset House and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows artists as they explore one idea they’re currently pursuing, to see where it ends up. From financial astrology to the black renaissance, quantum listening to the transformative powers of cute, along the way we hear from a cross-section of thinkers who have inspired them to help shape where it might go next.