Lyra Pramuk began singing at a younger age, but she all the time felt like a musical outsider. She lower her tooth in Pennsylvania church choirs earlier than attending conservatory, her ostensible plan to be an operatic baritone; in her 20s, she shifted gears and have become a denizen of Berlin dancefloors. Her vacation spot has all the time been extra idiosyncratic than something she might discover in a specific medium, style, or profession mannequin. “I solely got down to make an album as a result of everybody informed me I needed to,” Pramuk self-effacingly informed The Quietus in 2020, sizzling on the heels of her now-classic debut, Fountain. “I’ve been very a lot in my very own world, so I really feel type of naïve about all of this. I’m extra more likely to wish to speak about Susan Sontag or aesthetics.”
Fountain was composed totally of Pramuk’s voice, which she manipulated, distorted, and layered. It was a minimal album, not essentially within the vein of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, nor as a result of it sounded stripped down—Pramuk created a cavernous, haunting sense of house out of only one instrument. Her secret sauce was software program, but Fountain smacked of historic feats of ingenuity, harking back to the way in which cultures that persevered for millennia with out fashionable expertise might create mind-boggling works from sparse pure assets. The report’s lush vocals really feel much more prophetic as we speak than they did 5 years in the past—Pramuk harvested the digital fruits of the nascent 2020s to nourish herself for the deprivations of an unknown future.
Her follow-up fosters a equally natural sensibility, although it takes a unique path to the core. Hymnal is unabashedly maximalist: Pramuk embraces diverse collaborators, together with chamber ensemble the Sonar Quartett, and processes drawn from literature, visible artwork, and botany. Her vocal efficiency emerged from a set of unconventional directions: She used verse by the poet Nadia Marcus as the premise for a “geographical biology experiment” she constructed with the artist Jenna Sutela. This sculpture-cum-habitat was suffering from Marcus’ phrases, on prime of which Pramuk positioned oats; she then documented the expansion of a slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, whereas it overtook the grains, letting its path dictate the lyrics. Pramuk’s intricate, labor-intensive method locations her in a protracted lineage of composers who use likelihood operations and different musical notation programs, although her rating singularly suits her imaginative and prescient. Life, she tells us, finds a approach.
Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that appears much more liveable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a everlasting Might and June. The album’s execution is tech-forward, but tactile. Wielding a CDJ, Pramuk plaits violin, viola, cello, flute, double bass, and handclaps into her personal handled singing and speech. The seeds of the LP are human, filled with the identical mystifying DNA as its predecessor: Pramuk’s voice, which feels incantatory, and maintains its personhood previous the augmentation of expertise and the fidelity of change.