The Seed Award is a targeted package of support, including coaching sessions and a small bursary to enable artists to research and develop a particular project or take the next step in their creative journey.

In this Q&A, we speak to Seed Award 2025 winner Ailie Ormston, a composer and musician from Scotland making electronic music and chamber music that experiments with timbral abstraction, temporality, assemblage and improvisation.

What’s a sound you’ve heard recently that fascinated you?

Knocking on a mirrored sliding wardrobe door, water swishing around metal bowls/bottles. White noise and sounds in-between moments during a recording. Multiband delays and frequency shifters. Rhodri Davies’ bray harp playing. The strings on Jürg Frey’s String Quartet No. 2 performed by Quatuor Bozzini.

If your music had a visual identity or colour palette, what would it be?

Each voice as a collection of different soft-edged irregular shapes, made up of translucent layers. Browns, beiges, earth tones, oscillating between levels of bright and dull. Some shiny gems floating around. Everything moving and growing/shrinking, falling in and out of focus and depth. Blurry and grainy.

What directions or experiments are you excited to explore next?

Playing with different ways of cueing notation, away from strict/regular timekeeping. Writing for groups of people using objects and voice. Wrestling with my guitar. Experimenting with my use of fixed playback in a live setting.