In partnership with The New Radiophonic Workshop & PRS Foundation, The Oram Awards is a platform for innovation in sound, music and related technologies to elevate the work and voices of women, girls and gender minority music creators in electronic music.
Named after Daphne Oram, one of the founding members of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the awards aim to build on her legacy. Along with other women of the workshop, including Delia Derbyshire, Glynis Jones, Jenyth Worsley, Maddalena Fagandini and Elizabeth Parker, Oram played a vital role in establishing women at the forefront of innovation in newly-emerging audio technologies not only in the UK but around the world.
**Details of the 2022 Oram Awards Applications will be announced soon**
2021 WINNERS
MAGZ HALL
Magz Hall is a radio and sound artist, who works with a focus on expanded radio art in all its forms. She has worked internationally since 2000 having exhibited at YSP, Jerwood Arts, Barbican, Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, The V and A London, MACBA Barcelona, Place Des Artes Montreal and other galleries and festivals with broadcasts across the world. She is a senior lecturer at CCCU in Canterbury where her practice based research focuses on radio and sound art. In 1998 she helped set up the arts station Resonance FM in London, which started broadcasting full time in 2002. Magz went on to set up Radio Arts to promote radio art and artist radio activity. Magz completed a practice based PhD at UAL in 2015, titled Radio After Radio which looked at hundred years of radio art and made expanded radio works for an imagined vacated FM spectrum after switch over.
“I am delighted. It’s fantastic recognition for radio art and sound art I have been making since 2000, it means that I can start research and development on an exciting new longer term project”
VIVIENNE GRIFFIN
Vivienne Griffin lives and works in London, frequently moving between Berlin and the West of Ireland. They are an anti-disciplinary artist using sculpture, sound, drawing and writing in various forms including sound poetry, spoken word, extended vocals, videos and augmented reality.
They regularly change media, materials, and form within their practice. In audio works they engage with the primal act of vocalising sound, fragmented language, spoken word and synthesised vocals. As an Irish person who cannot speak their mother tongue, they use broken English as a defiant act. Words become forms to walk around, sound becomes a sculptural material. The physicality of language and the physics of sound have been a continuous source for audio works, drawings, and sculptures.
“Daphne Oram is a legend, she was a vanguard, it is an honour to win an award in her name. I've worked in the intersection of sound and fine art for some time...The Oram Awards is the perfect space for this kind of practice, as Oram defied expectations around what music could be and defined electroacoustic music, spiritually and physically”
LIA MICE
Dubbed a "pioneer of experimental pop" by Berlin's KALTBLUT Magazine, Lia Mice is expanding the boundaries of electronic music production and digital musical instrument design. A member of the Augmented Instruments Lab, Mice's futuristic-industrial aesthetic can be seen at her live A/V sets where she performs with her self-designed metallic sculptural large-scale digital instruments Prism Bell and Chaos Bells, and heard on her albums that fuse immersive soundscapes with experimental techno-pop. She has performed her instruments and live A/V sets at renowned venues including The Barbican, the V&A Museum, Ars Electronica Festival, The Tate Modern, WOMB (Tokyo) and the Museum of Arts and Design (New York).
With support from the Oram Awards, Lia Mice will push her digital musical instrument design practice into uncharted territories.
“I'm absolutely honoured to receive an Oram Award and join the cohort of radical minority gender and women artists shaking up music and sonic technology”
photo credit: Chris Turner
LOU BARNELL
Lou is a self-trained neurodivergent artist, influenced by material, colour and the strangeness of the everyday. Her body is a disorientated instrument and navigational tool that composes, scores, and communicates her synaesthetic experiences. Her approach to embodied listening and creating music is called ‘Live Dreaming’ which explores parallels between dream-states and musical performance. Lou merges gestural meditations with biorhythmic data, Max Msp and alchemical sculptures made from ice, bio-plastic and inks to communicate her intense, bizarre experiences of living with a learning difficulty.
In response to the pandemic, she launched IN-PROCESS on Repeater Radio. Womxn artists contribute objects, technology, and music to a collective radio archive; a ‘deep resource’ of counter-narratives and alternative histories.
“It's amazing to be part of the Oram Awards community alongside such incredible creatives. I’m excited by the prospect of developing and touring my work with sculptures, sensors and music and reaching more womxn with the IN-PROCESS archive to amplify underrepresented voices in performance and music”
Photo credit: Stu Allsop
MARIA SAPPHO
Maria Sappho (improviser, pianist, and researcher) works with verbatim collaborative theatrical storytelling with strong perspectives on nature, mythology, feminism, and community. She is a sound artist whose work is often with sculpture, dance, theatre, film, and currently AI.
She is a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, a founding member of the Noisebringers ensemble, composes as the dual being ‘Mariabrice Sapphocatherin’, curates for the monthly digital/live concert series ‘Mopomoso’, runs the Feminist Free Improvising group (a platform for under-presented improvising artists), and co-edit for the monthly political arts magazine the-mass.
“With the bursary I will be curating an event to celebrate the global practices of experimental improvised arts. Presented as a hybrid live/digital event the idea is to take advantage of a valuable gift I was given out of this isolating pandemic period – the ability to meet across distance and expand family. The event will present international artists who promote, challenge, and re-define what our experimental futures might be”
VENUS EX MACHINA
Venus Ex Machina is the alias of Nontokozo F. Sihwa, an electronic composer, producer and educator with a background in mathematics. She has contributed sounds and music to a range of projects including releases on NON Worldwide, Optimo Music, and AD93, installations for Hyperdub and the Nine Nights series at the ICA, scores for Channel 4’s short-film series Random Acts, and the forthcoming play James IV written by Rona Munro and directed by Laurie Sansom.
In 2018, she developed a “pirate AI” opera as a Fellow of CTM Festival, and led a workshop on radio transmitter building at Moogfest in North Carolina, titled Wireless Imagination and influenced by her fascination with the mythical and borderless nature of radio communication. She has also engaged in outreach, teaching workshops on music production and creative coding.In January 2021, she released her debut LP ‘Lux’ on AD93 Records.
“It is a great honour to be welcomed into the pantheon of Oram Awardees, and I am thankful most of all to Daphne Oram for her lightning vision and legacy, and also to the judges for supporting my work”
Photo credit: Karsten Buch
2020 WINNERS
LOULA YORKE
Loula Yorke is a composer and performer who uses sound, video and participation to create artworks. Dancing in the spaces where the personal meets the political, her varied and noisy electronic music practice conjours moments of revolt as well as revealing hidden systems of control. Yorke runs femme-centred synth-building workshops Atari Punk Girls, and co-founded the SonitusLIVE curated livestreams.
“I will be able to access mentorship for the first time, and I hope to take my instruments on a mini tour, creating connections and performing to new audiences in other regions of the UK.”
NIKNAK (NICOLE RAYMOND)
NikNak (Nicole Raymond) is a Leeds based music creative; an artist, performer, presenter, producer and turntablist. She makes experimental music that mingles with other genres. Her debut album "Bashi" is a sonic exploration and retelling of her time spent in Turkey, due for release November 2020. As a turntablist and sound artist, she has worked with artists like Shiva Feshareki and Anna Meredith, in creating soundscape-based live improvised performances.
“I believe that Turntablism has not yet been represented in the New BBC Radiophonic workshop and so to be the first Turntablist to be in the cohort is a true honour.”
POULOMI DESAI
Poulomi Desai is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Her work interrogates the politics of identity, listening and perception, inspired by her activist background and DIY post punk. She subverts broken sitars into new electronic instruments and melds circuit bent toys, optikinetic instruments, kitchen knives, and massage tools.
Under Covid restrictions, she has been exploring the mini-oramics instrument (made by Tom Richards) using data from pandemics, migration and financial markets.
“It's great to be part of this award with so many amazing creatives and I am looking forward to creating a solo release and the mentoring.”
UNA LEE
Una Lee is a South Korean, UK based artist working with sounds, stories and sensations. She sings, narrates, improvises, collects field recordings and makes graphic artworks. She creates immersive compositions, and designs performances and intervention scenarios. She is currently exploring, rethinking and contemplating the notion of ‘song’ through ‘Songs to Stay Awake to’, a spoken song project in collaboration with Poetry Jukebox.
“The bursary of the award will help me realise my project ‘Songs to Stay Awake to’ by supporting the involved musicians for their time and work. It will be a vital contribution to the production process.”
VICKY CLARKE
Vicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester. Working with sound sculpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she explores our relationship to technology through sonic materiality, live audiovisual and browser-based artwork. She is currently working on her debut album SleepStates which explores ideas around machine addiction, broken transmissions and algorithmic sleep territories.
“It’s a privilege to join the Oram awardees community. My obsession with electronics and machines and all those noisy hours spent experimenting in my studio with materials and solder have been worthwhile!”
YIFEAT ZIV
Yifeat Ziv is a London based vocalist, composer, sound artist and free improviser. She combines voice, electronics, field recordings and text to create interdisciplinary sound works that derive from her research of the human voice, technology, acoustic ecology and listening practices. In her performances and installations, she aspires to create situations where an active listening experience can emerge; an invitation to critically engage with sound.
“Especially in our current reality, I believe in the necessity of forming a network of creative women and gender minorities who have a mutual interest in innovation in sound and electronic music”
photo credit Murperphoto
2019 WINNERS
AIN BAILEY
Ain Bailey is a sound artist and DJ. Her practice involves an exploration of sonic autobiographies, architectural acoustics, performance, as well as collaborations with performance and visual artists, such as Sonia Boyce and Jimmy Robert.
photo by Cacau Fernandes
ANDIE BROWN
Andie Brown began performing and recording as a solo artist in 2007 under the name These Feathers Have Plumes. Experimenting with glass and electronics, Andie has created what she terms an “augmented glass harp” and in recent years her work has focused on sound installation.
CEE HAINES AKA CHAINES
Cee Haines is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who writes surreal and fantastical electro-acoustic music under the moniker CHAINES. Their album, ‘The King’, was met with critical acclaim (The Wire Magazine, FACT Magazine), and their works for the London Contemporary Orchestra have been premiered at major venues including The Royal Albert Hall (BBC Proms, 2018).
NWANDO EBIZIE AKA LADY VENDREDI
Nwando Ebizie has been carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism as Lady Vendredi.
She is a multidisciplinary artist with an international focus whose work converges around performance art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance.
credit Dimitri Djuric
NATALIE SHARP AKA LONE TAXIDERMIST
Natalie Sharp is a 360 artist from Cumbria at the forefront of what The Quietus described as 'New Weird Britain’. As Lone Taxidermist, her practice focuses on presenting live music in non-conventional settings, challenging existing frameworks and expectations. Exploring issues around gender and sexuality, her practice pushes at the parameters of the live environment.
STEPH HORAK AKA SHEISREVOLTING
Steph Horak is a sound and video artist. She designs systems for voice and composition, and performs on the improvisation circuit. She produces experimental pop music under the name SheIsRevolting. She focuses on error, malfunction and bad programming to create polyrhythmic sonic washes against a backdrop of homemade videos.
2018 WINNERS
GEORGIA RODGERS
Georgia Rodgers is a composer of instrumental and electronic music whose work focuses on textural and spatial aspects of sound and the experience of listening. In 2016 she was selected as one of Sound and Music’s New voices.
Georgia studied Physics and Music at the University of Edinburgh followed by a Masters degree in computer music taught by Michael Edwards. She is now pursuing a PhD in composition at City University, London, with a particular focus on the perception of sound, space and the human experience of listening. Her supervisor is Newton Armstrong.
Georgia also works part-time as an acoustician for a firm of consulting engineers, specialising in architectural acoustics. She lives and works (and was born) in north London.
LORAINE JAMES
North London native Loraine James is an electronic artist/producer (influenced by artists such as Aoki Takamasa, Telefon Tel Aviv and Toe) with a lot of promise and already a wealth of material. A master at crafting organic textures through inorganic means, she effortlessly blends Electronica and IDM with whispers of jazz and ambience all wrapped up in the artists key avant-garde aesthetic and sensibility.
Having released her debut album ‘Detail’ in 2017, Loraine has gone on to play at Shankra Festival in Switzerland, Rye Wax and Splice Festival at Rich Mix.
FRANCINE PERRY
Francine Perry is a 25 year old producer, composer and engineer based in London.
Under the moniker La Leif she makes gritty electronic music that sits somewhere between broken techno and a dystopian film soundtrack. Her new material takes inspiration from the urban soundworld as apposed to the natural soundworld of her debut EP ‘The Nest’. It involves field recordings taken in Berlin and London, meshing industrial sounds into a deep listening and club context. As well as making music Francine co-founded the London based collective for female and non-binary music producers called Omnii and is one half of the duo ORKA with whom she has toured across Europe, Hong Kong, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
Her next EP ’Violet’ will be released on August 31st by Blank Editions.
AJA
Using unsettling noise, distressed screams, hand made electronics and found objects pushed through pedals, AJA’s industrial beats and distorted drone, combined with a psycho-visceral, intense performance, challenges the audience by breaking down barriers and pushing limits sonically and visually.
HANNAH CATHERINE JONES / FOXY MORON
Hannah Catherine Jones is a multi-instrumentalist, scholar, radio presenter, composer, conductor and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra.
Her practice is connected through a central spine of inclusivity and decolonization. Myths, (both ancient and modern), word-play, appropriation and my own voice (in song) are my materials. Aspiring towards a totality of the performative experience – incorporating language, music, location and technology (lyrics, sound, site, documentation (content, performance, signs, devices)).
Foxy Moron, her alter ego, is summoned to epitomise the antagonisms of my performative investigations into language and action. Foxy Moron re-enforces a status as a living pun and armours me with the power of physiological disguise.
2017 WINNERS
EWA JUSTKA
Ewa Justka is a polish electronic acid-technoise artist, self taught instruments builder and electronics teacher based in London.
She is also interested in the notion of materiality of objects, vibrant, ontological systems (human bodies, electronic circuits, integrated circuits: varied range of micro and macro environments and relations between them) and an investigation of modes of quasi-direct perception through extreme light and sound actions, electronics, hardware hacking, breaking, deconstructing, wiring - or, to put it bluntly - designing synths and playing hard techno.
KLEIN
Have you heard of Klein? If not, then get ready to be introduced to a global phenomenon!
For the past two years Klein (Zoe Bell) has been living the dream out in LA, first of all as a backing singer for stars such as Victoria Justice and Nicki Minaj, before being discovered by music guru Tony Bennett who personally invited her to record in his studio. Since then, she hasn’t looked back.Her first single ‘Where’s the bulb?!’ became an internet sensation, racking up 495,078 views within a week of it being shared by legends such as Gary Barlow, Ray Mears and Enya.
CLAIRE M SINGER
Claire M Singer is a composer, producer and performer of acoustic and electronic music, film and installations. In recent years her work has focused on a mix of organ, cello and electronics and her debut album Solas was released on Touch in June 2016 followed by her second release Fairge in October 2017.
Performances and commissions include Union Chapel; Sound Festival Scotland; Tate Modern London; The Shunt Vaults; Chez Poulet Gallery San Francisco; XMV New York City; Fylkingen Institute Stockholm; Ceremony Hall Austin, TX; Norwich Arts Centre; Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Cologne; Muziekgebouw Aan' t ij Amsterdam, Oude Kerk Amsterdam and the Barbican London.
ELVIN BRANDHI
Freya Edmondes is a multidisciplinary artist and active in fields of fine, visual and audio arts. As a music producer she is participating in different projects such as NAPALM TREE.
Her solo project Elvin Brandhi combines experimental music with electronic beats. Described as being in a "genre of one"* her duo, Yeah You, are a father-daughter duo making noise-pop out of field recordings taken in Ikea car parks. Elvin's energetic and skilled performance work results in sonic art that does not easily fit into any specific category or genre.
KATHY HINDE
Kathy Hinde’s work grows from a partnership between nature and technology expressed through audio-visual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light.
Drawing on inspiration from behaviours and phenomena found in the natural world, she creates work that is generative; that evolves; that can be different each time it is experienced.
Kathy frequently works in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involves the audience in the creative process. She has created light and sound installations in public spaces, including urban streets, woodlands and forests.
MARY STARK
Mary Stark is an artist filmmaker with a background in textile practice.
Since 2012 Mary has been making 16mm film performances exploring optical sound created from fabric and stitch patterns. The filmmaking technology of optical sound involves visual forms in the soundtrack area of the filmstrip transforming into noise through film projection. Mary's performances summon absent voices and obsolete industries, involving 16mm film projection, light and shadow, mechanical noise and music associated with textile production.
SALLY GOLDING
Sally Golding is an British-Australian artist creating immersive audiovisual performances, sound art releases and participatory installations which consider liveness in audiovisual art as a mechanism for shared experiences and dialogues within new technological contexts. Golding blends discordant sonics and harsh lighting in her approach to sound through her innovative ‘darkroom compositions’ reminiscent of tape cut-ups created by reworking the optical soundtrack area of the industrial film sound system as a site for psychoacoustic ‘radio play’; experimentation with lathe cutting her own audio inscribing recordings with the sound of the substrate; and live interference and generative feedback systems using amplified lighting and light sensitive audio including instrumentation with repurposed camera flash units and laboratory strobe lights.
SHELLY KNOTTS
Shelly Knotts produces live-coded and network music performances and projects which explore aspects of code, data and collaboration in improvisation.
She is currently based in Melbourne, AUS. She performs internationally, collaborating with computers and other humans. She studied for a PhD in Live Computer Music at Durham University with a focus on collaboration in Network Music. She is currently a Research Fellow at SensiLab, Monash University working on Improvisational Interfaces.
