Nisha Ramayya works across poetry, criticism, and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She’s the author of two poetry collections, Fantasia (Granta, 2024) and States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019; reissued by Spiral House Editions in 2025), as well as the co-authored pamphlets Threads and Siblings, among other publications. Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane's experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.
O YAMA O is with Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, Keiko Yamamoto, and Rie Nakajima
‘How often are we in such intimate closeness to the materials of sound, the physicality of a naked voice, without chairs, microphones, distance, so conscious of light, climate, atmosphere, the nearness of other bodies, the permeability of a structure that is outside as much as in?’ – David Toop
Formed of artist Rie Nakajima, artist Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, allEars Festival, Empty Gallery, Novas Frequencias, LCMF, Hybrida, Somerset House, Hombroich raketenfestival, Vostell Museum, reiheM and many more.