aquasomatics
aquasomatics
Ailie Ormston is one of the most striking artists from the Scottish music scene. Using acoustic and electronic materials, their work is constructed through improvisation and assemblage, embracing musical interests in motivic development and timbral abstraction, as well as hifi and lofi sounds, repetition, microtonality and song. Although sprawling in approach, Ailie has a deft hand at reigning their materials, using economy as a key tool to chisel their work and give it its lopsided distinctiveness in solo and collaborative settings.
Holly Pester brilliantly sums up Nat’s poetry when she says that: Raha is a poet who is prepared to say and to un-say common language, to create new spaces of speech, subjectivities that form in language – on the basis of what it’s possible to utter yourself as. As much as it’s queer, transfeminist, communist and revolutionary, Nat’s is also a post-punk poetry: the DIY liveness of her reading voice, which pulls apart and de/re-constructs subject positions in non-linear ways, to make a tune of everything that is written on the page.
Arika and Counterflows have invited Nat and Ailie to rehearse some ideas together, and share them with us in an open rehearsal of collaborative working. As they practice sound and spatialise their thinking around the history of racial capitalism and oceans or water: of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.
The music programme at Episode 11 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.
ReadBios
Ailie Ormston is a composer and musician from Scotland making experimental electronic music and chamber music. Ormston has received commissions from Counterflows (2018, 2021, 2024), Tectonics (2022), Cryptic (2022) and the Barbican (2024), where compositions for a mixed ensemble of harps, guitar, saxophones and strings were performed at LSO St Lukes alongside new works by Mica Levi. They have worked collaboratively with Tim Fraser on It Changes (bison; 2022) and Finlay Clark (Still House Plants) on Sunflowers Face The Sun (33-33; 2020). Ormston’s new album of compositions for electronics, electric guitar, double bass and cello, Frames that lean, pictures that roam, is forthcoming on Akashic Records; this follows their debut solo release The Sedate/Tony Soprano Fashion Inspo. (50% PURE, 2018). Ormston is currently writing a string quartet for New York’s JACK Quartet as part of their JACK Studio programme, to be premiered in 2025/6.
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.
Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ in Social Text.
▴ Nat Raha, Credit: Alex Woodward
▴ Ailie Ormston, Credit: Bradford Bailey
▴ Nat Raha, Credit: Alex Woodward
▴ Ailie Ormston, Credit: Bradford Bailey
Access
Subpac
This event is suitable for Subpac. Three Subpac units are available for selected events in Tramway 1. Worn like a low-profile backpack or attached to your chair, Subpac’s pulse sound (especially bass) through your body. Reserve in advance or request on the day at the Tramway Box Office on a first come first served basis. more
Ear Protection
This event will have sections that are at a loud volume. Ear Plugs will be available on the door. A number of Ear Defenders, will also be available, first come first served on the door.
See general Access information for Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It event
Artists
Nat Raha
