Errant Listeningbetween a Do and a ReNisha Ramayya and O YAMA O

Drawings by Keiko Yamamoto (of O YAMA O). Courtesy of Keiko Yamamoto

‘I can hear little clicks inside my dream.’
– Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

The third Errant Listening programme begins from an acknowledgement of both the privilege and urgency of listening in the midst of ongoing geopolitical violence and class struggles across the globe, and from an awareness that sound and listening are always gendered and racialised.

between a Do and a Re borrows its title from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing on feminist responsibility in the act of listening: between a Do and a Re exist not only a half, a quarter, or an eighth of tone, but ‘a whole variety of shifts and fluctuations of sound’. It proposes a mode of listening that remains in formation and fluctuation: a listening towards the in-between, a space on the cusp of becoming and disassembling. An active attunement in which grief and loss can remain, be held. An interval that can be expanded. An intimacy being voiced, approached. A ritual. A dream.

The evening interweaves poetry reading by Glasgow-raised, London-based poet Nisha Ramayya, with the interstitial sounds of London-based band O YAMA O. Ramayya's work engages extensively with Sanskrit, Tantra, myth, and sound to open space for meditations on diasporic identity, language, postcoloniality and resistance. O YAMA O emerges from the transversal – the crevices, tremors, and vibrations of everyday objects – folding in the intimacy of singing, humming, and chanting with folk and mythic references. Together, their performance suggests new registers of listening and opens up potentials between and alongside the ritualistic and the mundane, the sublime and the everyday, while remaining attentive to embodied feeling and sentiment without being overtaken or reduced by them.

Free entry, booking essential.

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Light dinner and drinks will be provided.

Errant Listening is an experimental, open-ended programme series that attends to the sonic dimensions of contemporary artistic practice, documentation, and curation. The series explores how sound wanders, unsettles, and exceeds the structures that seek to contain it. By focusing on the un/archivable – the sounds and vibrations that slip away, withdraw, or refuse legibility – and foregrounding the sonic agency embedded within these activities and gatherings, the series proposes ways of understanding the archive not as preservation, but as attunement, and listening not as perception, but as transformation.

Errant Listening is curated by Jiaying Kou, Publications and Programmes Lead.