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. Her debut album Fountain was released in 2020 on Bedroom Community.

Created entirely from her own voice, although often shaped and structured by electronics, Fountain is an emotional, sensual, and devotional journey. The title is derived from her family name, Pramuk, which is related to the Czech word for ‘well spring’ or ‘fountain.’ Often wordless, these songs evoke a new wholeness sustained by the ritual force of drowning, immersion, cleansing, and bathing – also referred to in the album artwork by acclaimed visual artist Donna Huanca. Fountain plays with the perception of music, rhythms, speech, body, and the relation between technology and humanity, exploring a post-human, non-binary understanding of life and the fragile ecosystems it depends on. The work documents a healing that is still in process, and a full circle-moment that reunited Lyra with her sound engineer twin brother, Ben, for the final mix, which they completed in tandem.

Where the voice is deployed most imaginatively and seductively for Lyra is just where the orbit of electronic music is conceived as a modular spectrum. Seizing on recorded work as well as performance to be a process of sampling and synthesis, genres are cross-pollinated and extended, returning all the while back to her formative impulse that storytelling is song, and song is a means of short-circuiting the structures we are sold as real difference in this world.