AVA London publishes the full 2026 festival programme for its club culture conference

AVA London has put out the full programme for its 2026 edition, and the shape of it says a good deal about what the event has become. The three days from 24 to 26 September carry more than 30 workshops, around 70 speakers and an expected 8,000 attendees, split between a daytime conference on club culture and electronic music and a night programme in real venues.

Clash, which reported the lineup on 21 September, notes the range of names involved. Moby and The Avalanches are taking part, as is Oklou, which puts artists a generation apart on the same bill without either being there simply to headline a stage.

One of the more pointed sessions is Black is a Spectrum: Discussing The Music Is Black Festival, presented by East Bank. It brings Footsie, Jamz Supernova, FLOHIO and Shy One into the same room, hosted by Gillian Jackson. Panels about Black British dance music tend to be assembled from people who write about it; this one is built from people who make it.

The No Tags team are recording a live podcast, with hosts Tom Lea and Chal Ravens in conversation with Tim and Barry to mark 25 years of that partnership. Their archive of grime and UK underground footage is one of the few continuous visual records of the period, which makes a live retrospective more than a nostalgia slot.

Drum and bass gets a keynote of its own, with UK DNB figures discussing more than 30 years of a genre that started in this country and has never entirely left it. The Game Changers keynote panel returns as well, bringing together Mary Bekhait, chief executive of YMU, Anya Du Sauzay, marketing director and head of label operations at Atlantic Records UK, and Sam Spencer of Broadwick Live and the London Nightlife Taskforce, with further names to be announced.

That last combination is worth noticing. A management chief executive, a major label operations lead and a figure who sits across both a venue operator and the city's nightlife policy body is a fair map of who actually decides what British club culture can afford to do next.

The after-hours side runs at FOLD, Outernet Live, EartH and other London venues rather than on a temporary site, which keeps the festival tied to rooms that have to survive the other 362 days of the year. For a conference whose subject is the health of club culture, the choice is part of the argument.

AVA London runs from 24 to 26 September, with tickets still available. Other festival bills as they are announced are tracked on the festival tracker, and more electronic coverage sits on our genre hub.