Crafting immersive soundscapes through a singular approach to voice, producer Lyra Pramuk blends her classical training with pop and contemporary club culture through a fractured, ever-shifting lens.
The Berlin-based, American-born artist draws inspiration from avant-garde icons such as Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk and Terry Riley to create conceptual compositions that use technologically manipulated vocals as a means of exploring themes of spirituality, post-humanism and her own identity as a non-binary trans woman.
Raised in a small town in Pennsylvania, Pramuk began singing in choirs and musical theatre before studying at the Eastman School of Music. Her 2020 debut album Fountain received critical acclaim for its near-exclusive use of processed vocals, while the follow-up LP, Hymnal, expands her sonic palette through collaboration with the Berlin Sonar Quartett to create an uncannily beautiful blend of voice, strings and digital textures.
Your biography mentions you’re a producer, vocalist, performance artist and, unusually, astrologer. Is astrology something that’s important to your art?
“I’ve studied astrology in a non-traditional way – reading books and YouTube videos that are educational but include some very high-level professional astrologers. I started to offer natal chart consultations and have obviously been really busy with music too, but I do plan to do more formal study.
“Modern astrology includes all the planets in our solar system alongside asteroids and other fixed stars that we can see, and keeps expanding as more information is uncovered. I find that really interesting and would say it’s embedded into my music practice and life in general.”
The title of your new LP, Hymnal, might also have celestial connotations. Is that the case?
“When I first started making music, I was much more conscious of how it might be perceived within the culture and the economy, but now I feel like my artistic, personal and philosophical perspective is a lot more grounded in the idea that music is something sacred and has a very transcendental, spiritual bent.
“We know that music is healing and sound waves and chord frequencies can modulate cells in our body, so I really just wanted to sit in that and say, I know there’s an economy out there that I’m dependent on but I refuse to be overly-defined by capitalism. For me, Hymnal is like a book of worship songs, and the process of making the record is about understanding what I believe in.”
You’ve mentioned that society needs to go through a process of unlearning. Do you apply to music-making too?
“I’m very grateful for what I learned, but I’ve also spent a lot of my adult life trying to unlearn and what I’ve found is that having specialised skills can sometimes interfere with being in community with other people.
“As much as there are people doing amazing work to make classical music more accessible, it’s no secret that it’s had issues connecting with young people and is not always the most open-minded culture. I’ve found the dance floor to be a more powerful political space, and one that’s shaped me as a composer. From there, I can draw on classical influences and reintroduce them with new meaning.”
If there’s an instrument on Hymnal that shines through other than your extraordinary vocal, it’s strings. Why did you want to embed those into your sound?
“Before I even knew what the album was, I was feeling a lot of grief and sadness about the way the world is constructed, for example, the relationship we have with other creatures and nature and the way that we treat the planet.
“As I was trying to understand what to do with those emotions, I began listening to a lot of my favourite music, which happens to be very string-based. So I listened to a lot of classical symphonic repertoire, string quartets and contemporary chamber pop with strings. I also played cello when I was a child, so felt that I was in a good position to do this – I just needed to figure out how. There are few better instruments than strings to embody the story of the earth.”
Sometimes those instruments sound beautiful, other times they’re uncomfortable to listen to. What tonal qualities were you looking for to complement, or maybe contradict, your voice?
“In terms of writing, recording and arranging, it was really important for me to work with an existing string quartet. In relation to Christian hymns, there are often four voices – soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, so I wanted to adopt a minimalist strategy of writing four part/four voice and repopulate that process in a way where it could become more expansive, just as I do with my own voice. I wanted to work with a quartet because they spend a lot of time trying to be in tune with each other, and I think it’s really important to get individual players who are used to doing that during a one or two-day recording session.
“The Sonar Quartett is based in Berlin and they’re phenomenal players, but the most special thing was that they were able to spend time improvising vocal sketches of mine, which became part of the record in addition to other parts that we wrote and recorded together. Basically, all of the vocals you hear on Hymnal were improvised, so I needed to work with people who could match that energy and I wanted the strings to sound as alien as possible.”
How did you achieve that, technically?
“I got some closed mics and placed them super-close to the wood to create a very unnatural, electronic sound, but I also had them play very basic, straight tones, which very much sounded like a sawtooth synth. We had to work to get there, because string players are not typically used to sounding so abrasive and intense, but I found that a good way to blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic music. As a trans person, I find that people find us weird in the same way they find nature weird, so I wanted the strings to embody the strangeness, chaos or unpredictability that’s so often painful and confusing, yet part of my understanding of how to be at peace with the world around me.”
Vocals are your primary instrument, but in this case did the tracks originate from vocal or string takes?
“Limiting myself to work with voice is a core part of my practice and something I do as a ritual, so I like to improvise recorded vocals, process them using granular synthesis and create layers that are quite choral.
“I always have a folder of sketches that tend to get inspired by implementing certain techno and dub processes, but when I realised I wanted to work with strings, I automatically started another process of writing a ton of chord progressions on a sawtooth synth via a MIDI-connected keyboard routed to Ableton. When I was arranging and preparing demos for the string recording sessions, I started to bring in some of the vocal productions and that’s where everything aligned.”
Are there challenges to creating rhythm-less sketches based solely on strings and manipulated vocals?
“I went crazy for six weeks just deciding the tempo because I needed to have them on a click track. A demo would start at 120bpm and then I’d want it to be faster but couldn’t figure out what would be too fast. Eventually, everything was set between 135 and 140. I had these MP3 previews from the string sessions and conducted a week-long vocal improv session with those, recording a huge sample bank and spent about three months organising all of them.
“I also brought in CDJs to see how I could match things together, but it was all very messy at that point because I just wanted to free up my thinking a bit. Bringing that DJ mixing sensibility into the post production allowed me to create slow, filtered fadeouts and use analogue saturation, delay and reverb swells, so the tracks are produced and mixed with a very DJ-centric approach to contextualise everything.”
Using CDJs is not an obvious way to produce. Why do that instead of producing in the DAW?
“The CDJ has such a different interface – the workflow is similar to getting on a pottery wheel. I’m a very good editor, but I didn’t want to go right into editing because I felt that could be limiting. I just wanted to be a bit more tactile and improvised, as though I was dancing or moving with the material.
“Even if my music is complex and the palette is very detailed, it’s also refined. When I choose certain granular synthesis engines or effects palettes, I like to stick to them across a whole record because adding a paint or colour to the sounds creates a familiarity that is pleasing as a listener.”
The track Incense is a good example of how you cut up vocals to create abstract images that can be quite disorienting. Can you describe what you’re trying to capture?
“Technically, there’s something about the harmony on Incense that’s eerie but also has a very warm, film-like quality. Processing-wise, we recorded a few takes of violin and viola loops at different octaves while layering softer versions and others at a higher pitch until I suddenly had what sounds like a 16-piece string ensemble.
“Then I added some glitch scatter effects, where you got this kind of electronic-filtered-through-a-radio effect on the tops of the strings and reverb swells that act like a perfume or incense. With the vocals, I created these haunting, eerie coo-coo chants that are really gentle and subtle, then I formant-shifted them so they sound really weird.
It’s odd, wonderful and seductive, but also a bit scary – like an alien creature
“The effect I’m looking for with the vocals, strings and chord progressions is like discovering something for the first time – for example, being on an island or in a forest somewhere and seeing a flower in bloom that you’ve never seen before. It’s odd, wonderful and seductive, but also a bit scary – like an alien creature.
“The way I cut a lot of tracks means they end just when they’re getting started, so just as you start to savour or understand something it’s pulled away from you – and I feel like that’s an artistic analogue for the kind of disconnect that most of humanity has toward the earth.”
What tools do you use for formant-shifting vocals?
“I’m very neurodivergent and sensitive to that and tend to intimately know how different plugins sound so I can use them for different purposes. For example, Soundtoys Little Alterboy’s formant shift feels much more electronic and synthetic, so I’ll use that when I want a vocal to feel more like a drum machine sample or artificial, and others when I want them to sound more realistic, eerie or high-fidelity.”
Was there a point where you felt the tracks were starting to coalesce into something unified?
“Funnily enough, the word coalesce is in the name of the main sequencer I’ve been using. There’s a Max for Live instrument from dillonBastan called Coalescence where you put a sample in and it organises slices by timbre on an XY grid so you can analyse it in different ways.
“I’m also using a digital sequencer called Roulette and a very techno-like process where I’m using a sampler tool to sequence everything together. I’m fascinated by recording very emotive, acoustic vocals and strings, then deploying and arranging them using a techno or dance music methodology.”
Dance music is often relegated as an art form, but would you say that people don’t fully appreciate the effect it has on them, especially in a physical space?
“Obviously, rave music is about that – it inspires movement or sound waves passing through the body in a certain way so that when a sub hits, you’re like, whoa, and you really feel it. The ostinatos or rhythmic cell sequences I use are designed to break apart or move the listener, so I’m looking for my music to have a physiological, material effect on the human body, with the harmony and voice adding an emotional layer.
“An essential aspect of my technical process is designing delays to simulate a physical environment inspired by the multi-dimensional spatial experience of the dancefloor. On this record, I pushed this aspect even further, spatialising the sounds in a number of ways to create a super-rich, layered panning effect with many different plugins and delays, so I’m not only trying to create a simulation of the 3D and the real, but a physical sonic environment where the listener is immersed in the sound-world as it moves around them.”
The way you use vocals is highly distinctive and such a prominent part of your sound. Do you have a sense of this uniqueness?
“I like to produce really cool-sounding vocals that still sound very human and organic, even though some of them are highly digitally processed. The effect is about reconfiguring what a human voice is so it’s not just aesthetic, but political in terms of creating space for a more equitable human culture that’s more accepting of difference and disability, racial difference, gender difference, and transness. I believe music has that potential to open new social, political and cultural windows and I want to believe in its power to transform hearts and minds.
For me to make vocals that are complex and ugly is really a fuck you to the whole recorded music industry
“I think that’s why I go down these really deep vocal rabbit holes. In the context of Gen AI, I always had it out for pop music because it felt like it was trying to coerce people on a basic level, but I also have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it because when I was a teenager there was incredible pop on the radio like Missy Elliot, Timbaland, Ludacris and Outkast.
“Now it’s gotten so commercial and diluted, especially the vocals you hear, so for me to make vocals that are complex and ugly is really a fuck you to the whole recorded music industry.”
Your music is all about connectivity and the unique power of the human voice. Do you see any positives in the implementation of AI or is it antithetical to everything you’re trying to transmit?
“To say there are no positive potential outcomes would be very naive, not just artistically but on a cultural level. AI is already curing chronic genetic diseases and saving people’s lives, so who am I to say those people don’t deserve to live?
“Of course there are lots of risks – it will create new military and surveillance state terrors, but at the same time wonderful advancements in climate restoration, curing of cancers and international collaboration. I like to think that I hold those contrasts in my music, in terms of all the beauty and the terror.”
Lyra Pramuk’s Hymnal is out now on !K7 Music. For more information, click here.
