Lyra Pramuk - Voice and digital deconstruction

Lyra Pramuk was born in 1990 in Hollidaysburg, a small town of a few thousand people in Pennsylvania, but as soon as she finished her studies she crossed the Atlantic to move to Berlin. In the German capital, engaging with the vibrant underground scene, she developed interdisciplinary artistic and performative practices that quickly made her one of the most interesting voices in contemporary music, with an approach that places her somewhere between avant-garde experimentation and pop sensibility.

After releasing a handful of singles and collaborating with composer Holly Herndon and multidisciplinary choreographer Colin Self, in 2020 Lyra Pramuk released her intriguing debut album Fountain, on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community. It's a multifaceted work in which the American artist experiments with the endless possibilities offered by her own voice, mediated through digital deconstruction processes.

Built around watery imagery, Pramuk's compositions possess a healing, almost thaumaturgic power while also engaging with post-human philosophy, breaking down the existentialist constraints of gender binarism in favor of a fluid, ever-evolving conception of identity.

Fountain brings together the avant-pop of Bjork, transfigured folk, echoes of religious psalms and sacred music, most likely the result of her youthful experience singing in the church choir where her grandmother played the organ. Her classical vocal training and passion for chamber music round out an original and innovative musical formula.

Research and experimentation continue on Delta, released in 2021, a "remix album" in which those post-minimalist tracks are reworked and enriched with sonic substrates that lend them new meanings and chart further directions. It's a project no longer solely focused on exploring the still-uncharted possibilities of the voice as an instrument, but one willing to be shaped by sounds and suggestions from vastly distant territories. From Gregorian chant to the latest-generation club culture, it's a journey that spans centuries and continents, incorporating deconstruction and abstraction, but also more accessible forms of avant-garde pop.

Among the contributors, names like Ben Frost, Vessel, Caterina Barbieri and Eris Drew (featured twice) stand out, but all fourteen reworks included are of considerable interest. The presence of tracks with a breakbeat and techno-trance edge livens up the final result quite a bit (as in the case of "Everything Is Beautiful & Alive" and the version of "New Moon" reworked by Tygapaw), making it appealing to a decidedly diverse audience.

At the same time, Lyra Pramuk devotes herself to teaching, leading the course "Experiments In The Future Of Performance" at New York University's Berlin campus, as well as to her passion for astrology and running the pop.soil label she founded, a genuine artistic laboratory that expresses its activities through workshops, collaborations and performances.

In June 2025 Lyra Pramuk released Hymnal, a work conceived as a complex collective ritual of healing practices capable of interconnecting human subjects, non-human organisms and digitized matter. The highly interdisciplinary artistic process dismantles and decenters the presumed human exceptionalism formulated within the traditional anthropocentric epistemological system, reorganizing the creative act into an assemblage of deconstructed and modified voices, improvised scores for classical instruments (mainly strings), mediated by a multitude of technological processes and forms of non-human intelligence. Through collaboration with the poetry of Nadia Markus, multidisciplinary artist Jenna Sutela and a specimen of the unicellular organism physarum polycephalum, human language is in fact reshuffled into an original puzzle of symbolic meanings, traces toward uncharted paths of knowledge.

While on "Meridian" Pramuk's theatrical spoken delivery still allows individual words within the lyrical fabric to be distinguished, throughout the rest of the album the technological apparatus applied to the composer's voice dilutes their meanings into the digitized sonic ocean in which they are immersed. The 14 tracks are the result of improvisations carried out in a hut in the Dolomites, re-recorded through a reamplification process 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 in a continuous repetition and reconfiguration of rhythmic motifs and harmonic colors.

Hymnal is an immersive, transmedial ritual-experiment that, at its premiere at Rewire 2025, drew on an elaborate visual component capable of broadening and amplifying its emotional and sensory impact.

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