Lyra Pramuk
Lyra Pramuk fuses classical vocalism, pop sensibilities, performance practices and contemporary club culture in what can best be described as futurist folk music. Devotional music, at its core, embodies the deep-seated human urge to express our innermost, primal emotions. For Lyra Pramuk, devotion is ingrained in her futurist folk music that harnesses the power and giddiness of technology to present the human voice as an object of limitless possibility.
Growing up singing in choirs, Lyra struggled to conform to the images and expectations of her small Pennsylvania town, creating a deep and complex internet-fueled interior world in response presaging her view of digital worlds as extensions of our embodied consciousness, liberated from real-world notions of presentation and acceptable knowledge. A diligent student at the Eastman School of Music, she learned that her skills lay in breaking with and reinterpreting the traditions of the academically-pure classical music that she was expected to uphold.
Finding communal ecstasy in the temples of choir and rave, Lyra’s immersion in the Berlin techno scene inspired works – including collaborations with Holly Herndon and Colin Self among others – that imbued ritualistic dancefloor experiences with a sense of sonic intimacy. A deep embrace of a spirituality unconstrained by imposed orthodoxies drives her compositional and performance processes. Body and spirit enter trance states in live performances, both fully ensconced in the worlds she projects – worlds where every utterance can sparkle with flame and purpose, and sound is truly seen as an extension of our physical bodies and conscious desires.
