Lyra Pramuk

by Claudio Lancia

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Born in Pennsylvania in September 1990 (in Hollidaysburg, a town of just a few thousand people) and now based in Berlin, Lyra Pramuk released a handful of singles and honed artistic collaborations with composer Holly Herndon and multidisciplinary choreographer Colin Self before arriving, in 2020, at her intriguing debut album "Fountain", released on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community. It's a work built around the use of the voice (at times propped up by almost nothing else), often digitally processed, aimed at probing the relationship between humans and technology: a kind of exploration of hypothetical futuristic, non-binary, post-human scenarios. Manipulations of a material that many have dubbed "futurist folk", into which the American artist pours as much of Bjork's avant-pop as certain devotional echoes, a legacy of her formative experience singing in the church choir where her grandmother played the organ. Vocal studies and a certain fascination with chamber music round out a genuinely original puzzle.

Research and experimentation continue on "Delta", released in 2021, a "remix album" in which those minimalist tracks are reworked and enriched with sonic substrates capable of lending them new meanings and charting further directions. A project no longer solely focused on testing the still-unexplored possibilities of the voice as an instrument, but willing to let itself be cross-contaminated by sounds and suggestions drawn from wildly distant territories. From Gregorian chant to the latest-generation club culture, it's a journey spanning centuries and continents, encompassing deconstructions and abstractions, but also more accessible forms of avant-garde pop. Among the names behind the contributions are Ben Frost, Vessel, Caterina Barbieri and Eris Drew (on two occasions), but among the 14 reworks included, not a single contribution falls short of interesting. The presence of tracks with a breakbeat and techno-trance edge livens up the final result considerably (as in the case of "Everything Is Beautiful & Alive" and the version of "New Moon" reworked by Tygapaw), making it appealing to a decidedly varied audience.

In June 2025 Lyra Pramuk released "Hymnal", a work through which she continues her personal creative pursuit centered on deconstructing and reassembling the voice as an instrument, this time leaning on scores for classical instruments (mainly strings), mediated by a multitude of technological processes and forms of non-human intelligence. While on "Meridian" Pramuk's spoken-word delivery still allows individual words of the lyrical fabric to be made out, on the rest of the album the technological apparatus applied to the composer's voice dilutes their meaning into the digitized sonic ocean in which they're immersed. The 14 tracks are the result of improvisations carried out in a hut in the Dolomites, re-recorded through a process of reamplification in the deconsecrated church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Venice. The vocal lines are multiplied into a multiform choir and blended with Francesca Verga's string arrangements, performed and varied through improvisation by the Berlin-based Sonar Quartett. This analog skeleton is then immersed in a sonic dimension that breathes and flows through a continuous repetition and reconfiguration of rhythmic motifs and harmonic colors. The result is an immersive, transmedia ritual-experiment that, in its live rendering, is enriched by an elaborate visual component capable of expanding and amplifying its emotional and sensory impact.

Lyra Pramuk has openly identified as a transgender person. She currently teaches "Experiments in the Future of Performance" at New York University's Berlin campus.

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