Launched to celebrate Daphne Oram’s centenary in 2025, the oram/100 project commissioned new works based around a new digital sample pack drawn from Daphne Oram’s archives. These exciting new works have been performed at venues up and down the country, signalling a new era of creative collaborations inspired by Daphne’s extraordinary life in sound, created by artists celebrated for their unusual, unique and unfiltered creative practices by the Oram Awards.
With the support of the PRS Foundation Beyond Borders, the Orams and Outlands tour will build audiences and strengthen connections between home countries through collaboration with leading organisations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that celebrate innovative and diverse artistic practices.
Presented with leading arts organisations: Moving on Music (Northern Ireland), Tŷ Cerdd (Wales) and Cryptic (Scotland), alongside artist workshops and a collaboration with Synthesize_Her (Northern Ireland).
Artist Commissions
Dali de Saint Paul, Lia Mazzari and Kathy Hinde – PanOrama
In the spirit of Daphne Oram, the trio craft a new piece 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.
Selecting short extracts from An Individual Note (1972), the trio use text and graphic scores to devise their improvisational collaborative performance. Oram’s writings will serve as both structural and conceptual inspiration, shaping the form and atmosphere of the piece.
To add an additional layer to the sonic performance, they 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.
afromerm and abi asisa – 1966 interrupted
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. The approach to interpreting the score developed over a series of sessions where the duo played through it, abi asisa on the electric cello and 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.
They 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 their interpretations. They 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.
NikNak – Origin
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
