Celebrating Daphne Oram's centenary, throughout late 2025 the Oram Awards is embarking on a tour to uplift and inspire female and gender-expansive sound artists and musicians in communities and grassroots venues across the UK

The Oram Awards builds on Daphne Oram‘s pioneering legacy as a founding member of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and her vital role establishing women at the forefront of electronic music innovation. Since 2017 the annual awards ceremony has celebrated an international array of artists bringing unique and inquisitive practices to electronic sound and music, all under the unified banner of “innovation in sound, music and technology.” From live coding and expressive sound design to tape loop manipulation and electro-acoustic exploration, the artists recognised by the Orams embody the uncompromising, adventurous spirit of the awards’ namesake. Alongside the ceremony itself, the Orams has expanded to encompass six-month mentorship programmes for award winners, sound workshops led by past recipients and partnerships with different venues around the UK. 

Anticipating the anniversary of what would have been Daphne Oram’s 100th birthday (on December 31 2025, to be exact), the decision was made to pause the open call awards programme and take the Orams on the road with a regional tour and extensive programme of projects across the UK. Partnering with the experimental sound network Outlands and focusing on grassroots music scenes, throughout Autumn 2025 the oram/100 tour will travel to Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, Salford (Manchester), Newcastle, Derby and Wirksworth, Derbyshire. The tour will take in music festivals, art galleries, universities and studios, partnering with local DIY collectives and artists to deliver a rich offering of workshops, talks, film screenings and performances. 

Among the planned performances are new commissions for past Oram Award winners,  based around a new digital sample pack drawn from Oram’s archives. In Bristol, Kathy Hinde, Dali de Saint Paul and Lia Mazzari will perform a commission that draws on Oram’s writings as well as her wider musical and technological practices. In Salford, turntablist NikNak will deploy her signature experimental scratch techniques on Oram’s sounds to create an improvised piece entitled Origin. The Silver Field will use her instrument The Time Painter, created with an Oram Award bursary, to perform with Oram’s sounds at the Haarlem Gallery in Wirksworth. 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 a compilation on nonclassical, culminating in a live event at the Barbican, London, on December 4 2025. 

“Daphne’s work is arguably one of the most important and pivotal contributions to electronic music, especially by a woman,” says NikNak. “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.”

Oram/100 New Commissions - Premiered Across the Tour

oram/100 commissions – premiered across the tour

Dali de Saint Paul, Lia Mazzari and Kathy Hinde
Premiere: 25th October 2025 – Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol

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.

Afromerm and Abi Asisa – 1966 Interrupted
Premiere: 25th October – BEAST, Birmingham University

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.

Nik Nak – Origin
Premiere: 1st November 2025: Fat Out Fest, Islington Mill

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

The Silver Field – Daphne meets The Time Painter
Premiere: 29th November 2025: Haarlem Gallery, Wirksworth

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.