oram/100 Artist Commissions
New work from several artists, inspired by Daphne Oram and using sounds and other material created by her, which will be premiered across the oram/100 tour. Celebrating Oram's centenary, throughout late 2025 the tour will take in music festivals, art galleries, universities and studios, partnering with local DIY sound collectives and artists to deliver a rich offering of workshops, talks, performances and several newly commissioned pieces of work detailed below, based around a new digital sample pack drawn from Daphne Oram's archives.
The sample pack will also be used by other artists connected to The Oram Awards and other high-profile acts to create new works for "Vari/ations - Ode to Oram", a compilation on nonclassical, culminating in a live Vari/ations event at the Barbican, London, on December 4 2025.​
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Dali de Saint Paul, Lia Mazzari and Kathy Hinde - "PanOrama"
Premiere: 25th October 2025 - Arnolfini, Bristol
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Kathy Hinde, Lia Mazzari and Dali de Saint Paul are experimental artists and Oram laureates based in Bristol. They're working often through collaborative encounters to create recorded and live events, through processes of amplification, installation, transmission, and intervention. They use voice, field recordings, cello, electronics, film, materials, and objects for their composition and performances.
In the spirit of Daphne Oram, the trio will create a new piece "PanOrama" guided by experimental techniques, blending improvisation, synthesis, and transmission technologies. Aiming to bridge past and present, "PanOrama" follows Daphne’s own words on its compositional process, combining archival materials - both samples and test scores - with the artists contemporary sound practices.
Dali, Lia and Kathy’s composition will be guided by Daphne’s own words. They will select short extracts from ‘An Individual Note’ (1972) to use as text and graphic scores to devise their collaborative performance. Oram’s writings will serve as both structural and conceptual inspiration, shaping the form and atmosphere of the piece. By combining archival materials - both samples and text scores - with their own contemporary sound practices, they aim to bridge past and present.
To add an additional layer to the sonic performance, they aim to work directly with materials from Tower Folly (Oram’s studio) to generate 16mm film through camera-less film making processes such as photogram and frottage. This will be incorporated as both a visual projection and a further sonic layer generated by the optical soundtrack of the film, referencing Oram’s Oramics machine she used to translate visual gestures into sound.
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afromerm and abi asisa - "1966 interrupted"
Premiere: 25th October 2025 - BEAST, Birmingham University
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1966 Interrupted is composed entirely of electronically manipulated cello and voice, using two surviving waveform slides (1966) from the Oramics machine, composited into a graphic score. Our approach to interpreting the score developed over a series of sessions where we played through it, abi asisa on the electric cello and I (afromerm) on a mixer, controlling the parameters of various audio processing, obscuring the cello’s timbre in real time to the curvature of the waveform slides. We experimented with playing the same score in unison and also with playing opposite composite scores, where the two slides were in the inverse order, to create a disjunction between our interpretations. We interspersed the version we were most drawn to with vocal (afromerm) and cello (abi asisa) 'interruptions' – often informed by zoomed-in moments/contours in the graphic score – which were scattered collage-style throughout the piece; a kind of intergenerational, transtemporal sonic conversation with Daphne Oram.
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NikNak - "Origin"
Premiere: 1st November 2025: Fat Out Fest, Islington Mill
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An improvised turntable performance honouring Daphne Oram.
For this special live performance on turntables, NikNak will create an improvisational piece using Daphne's unique sounds, responding to them in real-time and manipulating them using effects and experimental scratch techniques to create strange, new textures from the Oram archives.
"Daphne's work is arguably one of the most important and pivotal contributions to electronic music, especially by a woman. Being a part of her legacy as an Oram Award winner, she and my comrades continually inspire me to make the musical worlds I want to create, unabashedly and as authentically as possible." NikNak
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The Silver Field - “Daphne meets The Time Painter”
Premiere: 29th November 2025: Haarlem Gallery, Wirksworth
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Using her new instrument The Time Painter — created with the Oram Awards bursary — Rose Kindred Boothby AKA The Silver Field will weave together sounds from the Daphne Oram archive in a live improvised electronics performance.
The Time Painter (2025) is an instrument, artwork and sound processor, using the magnetic media of old floppy disks as a tactile sound-surface on which to process both live and prerecorded audio. The disk becomes a boundless physical landscape of sound, of unlocked loops moving through non-linear time, recording and playing from continuously variable temporal perspectives.
The sonic source material for the performance comes from a new sample pack created from Daphne Oram's archive in celebration of what would have been her 100th birthday in 2025.
