Sing in me, Muse / Lyra Pramuk

Sing in me, Muse

A conversation with Lyra Pramuk ahead of her performance at Lost Festival on 4.07.2025

Her chants cry out for communion with the cosmos: a call to abandon prefixed belief systems and reconnect with the most instinctual force of all: humanity. Shaped by ancient, primordial tones, Lyra Pramuk’s music is a pluralistic blend of philosophical and theological structures, each deeply embedded in her sonic practice. As we wait for her to take the stage at Lost Music Festival, we spoke with Lyra about her organic soundscapes, the majestic recording spaces she’s explored and the presence of an unusual biological intelligence that has insinuated itself into her creative process: a slime mould that helped shape her soon-to-be-released album, Hymnal.

Before music was recorded, it was a ritual, a shared energetic act. How did you weave that pre-capitalist, pre-technological intimacy into the digital fibres of Hymnal?

I have been exploring bringing the ancient and the analog side of human music-making since my debut album, Fountain, which was recorded and produced entirely from recordings of my own voice. There is a timeless intimacy and resonance in the human voice that connects us to the very core of who and what we are as creatures, before industry and tech-mediated socialization, before electricity, or even clothing, or the harnessing of fire. I want my music to represent a practical and inspiring union between the organic and the digital. Politically, I feel that it’s possible to reclaim our roots without abandoning the wonders of technology, and actually that technology can be generative, a form of magic that shapes us and our world. On Hymnal, I’ve expanded my palette to include classical strings. I’ve always been captivated by stringed instruments and how they have evoked the deep emotional resonance of human stories throughout history. Made from wood and horse hair, stringed instruments create an intimate and immediate connection to our earth and the material world around us. The whole album features the Berlin-based Sonar Quartett string ensemble, with whom I collaborated on a partly-composed and partly-improvised session that forms the skeletal architecture of the whole album. I think of the strings as very human — as voices or spirits that intermingle with my own vocals. The effect of the album is this very human, electroacoustic imaginal realm full of wonder and breath and passion, earthly material, human stories.

If Hymnal is a liturgy, who or what are you praying to? Who do you imagine is kneeling down with you in that dark, electric congregation that your sound has delineated?

In assembling Hymnal, I was exercising a curiosity to investigate and define my sense of spirituality further for myself. I realized for me that this was not just one thing, but a pluralistic composite of many different philosophical and theological structures and belief systems, folklore, astrology and astronomy, Sufi spiritual practice, poetry, rave culture, and at the very center, my connection with the natural world and with the cosmos. My sense of spirituality is actually strongly rooted in the complexity of our world and outer space: there is so much that we do not understand. I find that exciting rather than frightening. I am comfortable with my limitations, even when I try to push beyond them. I believe that prayer has to work for each person, on their own terms, with their own beliefs and symbols, and I want my form of devotional music to be open and abstract enough to make room for many different perspectives and faiths.

“I want my music to represent a practical and inspiring union between the organic and the digital.”

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Do you consider the listener as an enricher, a contributor to your ritualistic act of creativity? How do you feel its presence while you’re still deep inside the compositional process, even before a single track is released?

I like Susan Sontag’s idea that art is not content, or something to be analyzed, but rather an intimate, sensual, erotic experience in its own right, that will be different for each viewer, visitor, listener. Each person brings their own background and perspective to create the reality of the work — they each imbue the artwork with their own subjective perspectives and experiences that give the work many different specific energetic definitions. This is what I find so beautiful about art: the complexity of experience that it offers to different people, and the potential that art carries to elicit totally different responses and take on many different types of meaning and significance. In that sense, I consider the listener to be crucial for my music. I make music to generate and inspire human beings, and the listener is everything! Even listening to an album on your morning walk can be a radical and rejuvenating ritual. If I understand your second question, you’re wondering how I feel the ritualistic presence of the music while I’m still making it? This is the wonderful thing about electronic music, that you can loop it and export it and listen to it at various points of the process, living with it, sensing its contours, taking breaks and coming back to work on the sound sculpture thing that lives as a demo MP3 on your laptop. I listen to work in progress versions of the music constantly through the process and feel the music not as a composer, but as a music lover, as someone who adores music. And in that sense, I am the first and most important listener to pay attention to when I am composing and producing :)

Your recording sites — a Venetian cathedral and a remote wooden house deep in the Dolomites — carry acoustic memory. How did those charged environments imprint themselves on the record’s bones? Can a space become a collaborator?

Absolutely! The Dolomites are so mythical and breathtaking, not just holding the acoustic memory of these mountains and valleys, but also creating a kind of “room” or acoustic from their massive size! The mountains reflect sound and alter the acoustical environment of the surrounding villages. I recorded with the friend of a good friend there, a week-long vocal improvisation session, and I would step out onto a balcony and greet the giant mountains in my short breaks in between takes. Those vocal recordings carry the energy of that place, and the mountains. I felt them so deeply the whole time I was recording. Their ancestral memory is printed on my own body in the recordings, it’s so different from recording in a studio, or in a city. I wanted to actually be with these mountainous beings and with the stars. The whole demeanor of my voice was different due to this. I shed tears many times in the process for the mountains and feeling them as an analog for my own body, feeling we were connected. For the vocal reamping at ex Chiesa dei Santi Cosma e Damiano with Cosmogram Studio in Venice, it was more literal; we sent the Dolomites vocal recordings through speakers in the church, and the result is literally the sound of that unique space. I had done a residency there in 2022, so in a way it was like a homecoming to record my vocals through the church and preserve them on the record in this way.

“I make music to generate and inspire human beings, and the listener is everything!”

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Talking about places, how does playing in the disorienting labyrinth of the Lost Musical Festival shift your approach to sound, control, and the experience of getting drift away?

Maybe it’s a weird thing to say, but I find it very comforting to be in the labyrinth at Lost — labyrinths feel like a really normal part of life and my practice somehow. Maybe I’m always in some kind of a labyrinth? I really love Lost and the energy there is very special. The promoters are bringing something unique to Italy and I always feel very lucky and happy to be there, it’s one of my favorite festivals in Europe. I am so thrilled to be back this year to present this new psychedelic string music!

In the tracks your voice isn’t just one thing: it’s fragmented, ghosted, multiplied. Less a soloist, more a choir of selves. Is splintering your way to finding unity?

If I felt the world needed more soloists, I would probably make more soloistic music. In fact, in the West, I think it’s obvious to many people that we have become too individualistic and soloistic for our own good. I didn’t necessarily become a soloist because I wanted to; for experimental music, it is often the case that you need to solo in order to be booked for concerts, it’s just too expensive most of the time otherwise, and the cost of living is just increasing. But I want my music to represent my deeper belief that music is an ancient, communal, sacred healing art. I began to record multiple takes of my voice purely due to economic restrictions. But I’ve started to understand that this multiplicity of voices also feels artistically more honest for me; I have many selves, many voices, many states, that I often embody in quick succession or even all at the same time. Unity is an ideal or an illusion, I find it much more interesting to trace the many composite parts of the whole. I’m also a bit allergic to creating a kind of polished, commercial, singer-songwriter sound, but I’d like to try to continue to fold language into my music in more coherent ways.

Hymnal carries a friction between distortion and grace, between glitch and sacredness. Can dissonance be holy? How would you define the sonic theology you depicted in your latest album?

Yeah, I guess I am a post-modernist and I find it very limiting to view sacredness as only very clean or beautiful. Sacred can be very messy, ugly, loud and dissonant in many cultures all over the world. It is probably some ongoing shadow work that the West needs to do to realize that incomprehensibility, “ugliness,” dissonance, can be integral parts of our expression and survival as a species. Spirituality doesn’t need to be this cleaned up, puritanical thing. My faith is full of contradictory emotions and expressions, friction is generative and I’m primarily interested in being honest and channeling the energy that comes to me.

There’s a pulse running through Hymnal that feels less like rhythm and more like organic. Do you think of sound as a biological process?

It might be organic, but it’s still all very rhythmic. There’s definitely an aspect of the aesthetic of my sound that I would say feels biological. I feel that biological processes represent a form of knowledge in our world that we probably do not pay enough attention to. Biology and physics represent formal, aesthetic, and structural processes for the organization of energy, matter, and life. Why not mirror that in my music? I find it extremely beautiful, but also wise, a form of knowledge embedded in our biological existence on earth. I love to mix that with more sleek and harsh electronic sounds and rhythms, creating a balanced composition of these different worlds. I have always had this fantasy that digital electronics and organic nature can go very well together!

“Sacred can be very messy, ugly, loud and dissonant in many cultures all over the world.”

The slime mould became your collaborator. What does it mean to hand over part of your creative control to a non-human force? Trust? Refusal? How is this different from letting AI dictate your next move?

Fascination. Discovery! Trust in other life forms, absolutely. I guess it’s related again to this biological intelligence, which we also are. I just really feel that human beings need to behold other creatures with the same wonder and curiosity that we do ourselves and our machines. Other life forms can teach us so, so much, if we can just watch and listen to them. We have grown so disconnected from the other creatures who have always been our teachers and companions. I’m also very open to collaborating with AI models.

Hymnal feels like a vessel for inherited sorrow: a sonic lineage stitched with the struggles of marginalised voices, from immigrant folk to gospel to warehouse techno. How do you hold the weight of these histories without drowning, while stitching your own thread into this sonic tapestry? Can music carve out justice in its frequency?

So these musical histories are sorrowful, for sure, but they are also fundamentally about liberating and empowering people. Detroit was about power and liberation and eros. Gospel is about communion and glory and the transmuting of sorrow into collective celebration. Folk music represents the legacy of a people. These are the musical forms that have always spoken to me as a producer and composer and songwriter, and I know that there is a lot of power and love there for me as much as there is also pain. And that pain and sorrow can be transformed. Music has saved my life so many times. I simply want to create musical objects that can be that support and electrical encouragement and energy for others. I feel like this is really what music is for, this is my musical story.

Is there a particular sonic moment in the album that still surprises you? A detail you didn’t plan, but that insists on being part of the story?

I am a really meticulous editor, I really edited the hell out of this music at almost every phase, from early demo production, to finishing the tracks, mixing, and even during the final mastering. So to be totally honest, not much about the music is a surprise to me anymore, it’s been through my brain, ears, and hands countless times. But I still really enjoy so many moments that I designed to be surprising. The jump from Oracle into Babel will always get me! With the Sonar Quartett, we improvised for hours on vocal sketches of mine, and many of their improvisations made their way onto the final record. This is stuff that they “wrote” in the moment with their incredible sense of care and musicality that is imprinted in my music, I still find that deeply special and surprising when I hear those more improvised passages, they always bring a smile to my face.

In the face of ecological and existential collapse, what rites must we invent to survive or to remember we’re still alive?

I think art and prayer are really good starting places. Rest. Creating quiet moments to speak with and be with each other. Cooking. Crying. Being outdoors among the miracles of this earth. And so many other things, so many different rites and solutions and strategies for each person and community. We are so diverse and so intelligent and so capable.

In a culture where music is flattened into algorithmic content, how do you protect the sacredness of your sound?

In the current media landscape, it’s a bit impossible to keep something totally sacred, but I’m not necessarily interested in that. My kind of devotional practice is folkloric in the sense that I want it to be accessible to me and to flow with the world and with my life, not struggling against it. There’s a certain humility in letting things be what they need to be in this time and place, while still stewarding and protecting the vision as best you can.

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