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Karen Sutton, Executive Producer of The Oram Awards curates a special playlist celebrating innovative female, trans and non-binary experimental & electronic artists.

Five of the most innovative experimental artists, composers and instrument designers from across the UK have been announced as the winners of this year's coveted Oram Awards, in partnership with The Radiophonic Institute and PRS Foundation.

Hanna Tuulikki, is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Glasgow. Their hybrid approach to sound blends vocal improvisation, voice-processing and composition, with manipulated field recording and electronics to tell 'stories' about reworlding in times of biospheric crisis. Currently, Tuulikki is studying migrating birds to ask how we might shift our understanding of migration as disruptive and view it instead as a process central to all life on earth, focusing on the extraordinary Marsh Warbler in particular. The Marsh Warbler composes its song by ‘sampling’ other bird species that it hears around the world during its first year of life.

Among this year's awardees is Liverpool-based conceptual sound artist and performer Lola De La Mata. Lola’s work explores listening and hearing practices, tinnitus and aural diversity, experiences of chronic illness as well as disrupting the embodied etiquette of classical music performances. Her 2024 debut album, Oceans on Azimuth, was inspired by her experience of severe tinnitus and featured sonic landscapes crafted from throbbing heartbeats and tinnitus phantoms reimagined through musical instruments made from glass, metal and even ice.

In addition to creating performances and interactive installations using light, sound, dust, and electromagnetic fields under the moniker xname, London-based Italian musician Eleonora Oreggia is the creator of REBUS, a novel musical machine that can be played by plucking electromagnetic waves. Similarly, The Silver Field, the project of East-Midlands based musician Coral Rose Kindred-Boothby, performs using modular synthesisers and other self-built instruments; weaving together song-soundscapes with samples, analog synthesis and live vocal manipulation, creating a rich and dream-like tapestry of sound.

Dali de Saint Paul is a prolific collaborator and a prominent figure in Bristol's improv scene. The raw vocalist has been experimenting since 2012; her frequently-improvised approach blurs sonic lines between instruments, destabilises spatial and linguistic borders, she embodies a polyphonic, politicised act of womxn through the ages.

This year's awards are taking place at Sheffield’s No Bounds festival on October 11th.

Named after Daphne Oram, one of the founding members of the original Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radiophonic Workshop, the awards aim to build on her legacy. With others she worked at the workshop creating music for the distant future, the distant past and inside the mind. 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.