Lyra Pramuk: Hymnal Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Lyra Pramuk started singing at a young age, yet she always felt like a musical outsider. She cut her teeth in Pennsylvania church choirs before attending conservatory, her ostensible plan to be an operatic baritone; in her 20s, she shifted gears and became a denizen of Berlin dancefloors. Her destination has always been more idiosyncratic than anything she could find in a particular medium, genre, or career model. “I only set out to make an album because everyone told me I had to,” Pramuk self-effacingly told The Quietus in 2020, hot on the heels of her now-classic debut, Fountain. “I’ve been very much in my own world, so I feel kind of naïve about all of this. I’m more likely to want to talk about Susan Sontag or aesthetics.”

Fountain was composed entirely of Pramuk’s voice, which she manipulated, distorted, and layered. It was a minimal album, not necessarily in the vein of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, nor because it sounded stripped down—Pramuk created a cavernous, haunting sense of space out of just one instrument. Her secret sauce was software, yet Fountain smacked of ancient feats of ingenuity, reminiscent of the way cultures that persisted for millennia without modern technology could create mind-boggling works from sparse natural resources. The record’s lush vocals feel even more prophetic today than they did five years ago—Pramuk harvested the digital fruits of the nascent 2020s to nourish herself for the deprivations of an unknown future.

Her follow-up fosters a similarly organic sensibility, though it takes a different route to the core. Hymnal is unabashedly maximalist: Pramuk embraces varied collaborators, including chamber ensemble the Sonar Quartett, and processes drawn from literature, visual art, and botany. Her vocal performance emerged from a set of unconventional instructions: She used verse by the poet Nadia Marcus as the basis for a “geographical biology experiment” she built with the artist Jenna Sutela. This sculpture-cum-habitat was littered with Marcus’ words, on top of which Pramuk placed oats; she then documented the growth of a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, while it overtook the grains, letting its path dictate the lyrics. Pramuk’s intricate, labor-intensive technique places her in a long lineage of composers who use chance operations and alternative musical notation systems, though her score singularly fits her vision. Life, she tells us, finds a way.

Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that seems even more habitable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a permanent May and June. The album’s execution is tech-forward, yet tactile. Wielding a CDJ, Pramuk plaits violin, viola, cello, flute, double bass, and handclaps into her own treated singing and speech. The seeds of the LP are human, packed with the same mystifying DNA as its predecessor: Pramuk’s voice, which feels incantatory, and maintains its personhood past the augmentation of technology and the constancy of change.