LYRA PRAMUK - Hymnal

Speak up

If “Fountain” was a personal, introspective cathartic journey, the new, formidable work by Lyra Pramuk takes shape as a complex collective ritual of healing practices capable of interconnecting human subjects, non-human organisms and fluid digitized matter. The highly interdisciplinary artistic process underpinning “Hymnal” unsettles and decentres the presumed human exceptionalism formulated within the traditional anthropocentric epistemological system, reorganizing the creative act into an assemblage of deconstructed, 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 single-celled organism Physarum polycephalum, human language is in fact reshuffled into an original puzzle of symbolic meanings, traces towards unprecedented paths of knowledge. In “Meridian”, Pramuk's theatrical delivery still allows the individual words making up the original lyrical fabric to be clearly distinguished, but elsewhere the technological apparatus applied to the composer's voice dilutes their meanings into the digitized sonic ocean in which the other instruments are also immersed.

As on her debut album, the human voice remains the primary instrument for the new compositions. Improvised in a hut in the Dolomites and then 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 with improvisations by the Berlin-based Sonar Quartett. This analogue skeleton is then immersed in a sonic dimension that breathes and flows in a continuous unfolding and reconfiguring of rhythmic motifs and harmonic colours.

“Hymnal” is an immersive, transmedia ritual-experiment that, in its extraordinary première at Rewire 2025, drew on an elaborate visual apparatus capable of expanding and amplifying its emotional and sensory impact. Lyra Pramuk has thus confirmed herself once again as an artist able to channel interdisciplinary performative and artistic practices into a symphonic work that seeks to strengthen empathy and connection with the living and non-living matter around us.

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03/09/2025