Contact:

8columns9lines@gmail.com

2024 AWARDS
Oram Awards
Sound of the Year Awards

Lola de la Mata (b.1991) is a London born French/Spanish conceptual sound artist, composer, curator and musician (theremin/voice/violin/sculptural instruments) currently based in Liverpool.

Tinnitus and aural diversity are at the core of her research practice, inspiring glass, metal, and ceramic musical instruments. Her debut album Oceans on Azimuth was released May 8th 2024 to much acclaim (The Quietus, Electronic Sound Magazine, The New Scientist, BBC Radio 6, A Closer Listen, Crack Magazine and others), for which her gaze is focused on the architecture of the ear and its auditory illusions. In collaboration with the Hudspeth sensory cell lab in NYC, Lola recorded her spontaneous otoacoustic emissions SOAEs (tracks ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ on the album), which won the category of ‘Most Unpleasant Sound’ for Sound of The Year Awards 2023.

Lola harnesses improvisation and subverts classical concert etiquette in her embodied solo and collaborative performances with fellow musicians, dancers and queer performance artists, most recently with Eve Stainton for the Lisson Gallery.

She has received commissions from the Riot Ensemble, Zubin Kanga, Nonclassical, Lisson Gallery, Spitalfields Music Festival, NoBounds Festival, Selina Thompson Theatre Company, and crafted soundtracks for experimental film, documentary and the award winning feature film STOPMOTION by Robert Morgan.

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While her background is in weaving, printmaking and Labanotation, her work sits across performance art, installation and sculptural composition. As a self taught composer who works outside of traditional western notation, her approach to score making incorporates conversation, poetry, photography and sculpture.

She was associate composer at nonclassical 2019-21, who supported her curation of “The Gaze” Nov19, a sold out cross-disciplinary night presented in a new music context (IKLECTIK), with a focus on women, non-binary and queer composers and artists.

Lola’s first release, feminist concept EP REMISE EN BOUCHE (palate cleanser) came out mid 2018 on Chicago net label Pan y Rosas Discos with track Curtain Call being selected for MIUMIU’s SS21 Digital Campaign. In Feb 2020 Nonclassical released The Embalmer, followed by Queens of the Drag (commissioned by Musicity) released May 2020 on ‘Her Indoors’, a compilation album whose profits went to sisters uncut, a charity campaigning against domestic violence.

Summer 2021 she supported Selina Thompson theatre company in delivering IMMERSION, a community sound project in collaboration with Artsadmin, and again summer 2022 in Leeds with ‘In Public Space’.

Her electroacoustic pieces have been broadcasted - Riot Ensemble [LAND] & OTHER HAZARDS supported by ZEITGEIST commissions 2020, BBC Radio 3’s ‘The New Music Show’. Following her guest curator takeover of ‘TafelMusik’ on NTS (11/20), her piece The Embalmer was curated into a playlist for WARP Records by artist Mira Calix, and ‘Annotations’ by SA Recordings. This led to her releasing KOH - Klee - uh on SA Recordings April 2022, a piece dealing with tinnitus and hearing loss in collaboration with Joby Burgess on canna sonora and Marianne Schofield (The Hermes Experiment, Riot Ensemble) on double bass.

Also in 2020, Lola received commissions from CoMA, Colliding Lines, Spitalfields Music/Rich Mix Open Call and Nonclassical x City of London. Her poetry was published in Somesuch Stories issue 5, a collaboration with artist and performer Olivia Norris and in Queer Dictionary by the Feminist Library. Autumn 2020, Lola worked on VAGUS - an experimental art film looking at digital migration, biased algorithms and screens, with Berlin based filmmaker, artist and model Britta Thie. Followed by a voice based soundscore for The Swimming Pool, a Spanish experimental feminist documentary by Carmen Dusmet Carrasco, a recent graduate of the Sandberg Institute.

Premiering in July 2021 at the Spitalfields Music Festival/ Rich Mix was the Open Call Project commission NULLA 0, a monolith. A sound art installation, community project and publication. Developed through conversations with 9 participants who identify across non-binary, womxn and women (cis/trans) on their English speaking voices, The project is about agency, amplifying voices that are often ‘nul’/nothing, 0/othered while sharing narratives which have typically been omitted from our collective histories. 

She has worked with dance companies and artists in London, Liverpool, Basel, Paris and New York. These include Eve Stainton, Around Sound event curated by Roisin Tapponi at the Lisson Gallery (July 2023), Rosie Terry Toogood, Clea Onori and Margarita Kennedy (Bufo Makmal), Anna Gaiotti, Mirei Yazawa, and Meghan Sipe.

Alongside her practice, Lola was the curator/facilitator behind the interdisciplinary artist group Parallel Praxis 2018-20. In 2020, Lola became a curator at the Feminist Library, initially developing a programme for Tate Exchange (cancelled), and later delivered a programme of talks, radio shows and performance events for Women’s History Month (March21).

For the academic year 2020/21, Lola was invited to teach on the MA Electronic Music module, and MA Women in Music module at the Royal College of Music.

October 2023 she was awarded the School of the Arts Scholarship to join the University of Liverpool as a PhD candidate, where her focus is on tinnitus, SOAEs, and the work of Maryanne Amacher.