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.

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. Her interests lay more in pop than opera, counting Björk, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, M.I.A, and Missy Elliot as inspirations.

Created entirely from her own voice, although often shaped and structured by electronics, the album 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 Pramuk 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 Pramuk 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.

Pramuk moved to Berlin in 2013 as a DAAD postgraduate study scholarship recipient, following her degree at the Eastman School of Music in New York. Since then, she has also been awarded residencies at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm, Open Port Club Residency in Tokyo and Sapporo, and Future Music Lab of the Atlantic Music Festival in Maine. Her interests also encompass writing, poetry, and fashion, where she is sometimes called upon as a model. As a performance artist, she has collaborated extensively with Donna Huanca and at events such as Glasgow International and the Rochester Fringe Festival.

The concert is part of the official side program of the exhibition Every Moment Counts – AIDS and its Feelings and the celebration of Queer Cultural Year.