Experimental Visionary Lyra Pramuk Breaks Down 7 Perfectly Produced Songs

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production.

During the improvisational vocal sessions for her new album, Hymnal, Lyra Pramuk would stand on the balcony of the remote wooden house in Italy where she was recording, and cry. Her view took in the sublime Dolomite mountains, which have been ravaged by climate disaster: In 2018, an extreme storm razed 14 million trees in the area, many of which had stood there for centuries. As she gazed over the scattered remaining pines still rooted into the mountains’ soft rock, she considered the ongoing destruction of the natural world due to human cruelty, and was overwhelmed with emotion.

“The mountains are literally scarred, and I have a lot of scars from surgeries that I’ve had as a trans person, so I felt connected to the land in this very deep way,” she explains from her home in Berlin. “Our arrogance as a society has caused me pain that is also causing these mountains devastation in other ways, and just to be with that, you sing very differently. The Dolomites are so ancestral, you can’t help but feel very small in their presence, and I wanted human beings to feel small on this album.”

For Pramuk, the particular location was a key part of her production process for Hymnal, which she wrote and composed in its entirety. As a classically trained musician, a virtuoso electronic artist, and a viscerally affecting singer, Pramuk carries the intentional fortitude of an academic alongside the unbridled anguish of an operatic diva. The 34-year-old considers production an act of transmission that is at once sonic, visual, sculptural, spatial, political, and intellectual. Hymnal’s themes include experiencing the human soul in the context of nature in our time of existential grief, an idea that helped guide how the album sounds and moves. “There needs to be a strong conceptual and emotional foundation for the work, which is the more philosophical, spiritual, hashtag-Rick Rubin side of production,” she says. “It’s very much like feeding back the shit of the world into artistic form—that feels like a responsibility right now.”

Pramuk’s 2020 breakthrough, Fountain, was an experimental-pop fantasia as well as a technical feat. That album was entirely made up of Pramuk’s own voice, which she looped, layered, stretched, twisted, pitched, and molded into a revelatory new type of wordless a cappella music. Her voice is still all over Hymnal, though it’s often working in tandem with—and sometimes overshadowed by—the sounds of Berlin’s Sonar Quartett, whose playing gives the album a folkloric permanency. After recording everything, Pramuk filtered the material through her CDJs, teasing out its hypnotic rhythms. This is music that encapsulates the treacherous state of modern humanity while sounding as if it were somehow made both 200 years in the past and 200 years in the future.

Along with the headier aspects of her production, Pramuk also gives considerable thought to the technical side: What kind of microphones should she use? How many? How will those mics be mixed? “I feel quite laboratory-doll in my approach—there’s a lot of testing, discovery, taking notes, trial and error,” she says. “That’s mixed with a guided process of intuition and somatic experiencing, just being a music lover and someone who’s obsessed with art and sound. Is this hitting for me? If it’s not, I need to keep laboratory-ing.”

The album’s wildest experiment involved collaborating with an entity you might actually find in a science laboratory: slime mold. Looking to work with language more on Hymnal, Pramuk enlisted her friend Nadia Marcus to write poems for the album—but she didn’t want to just sing them. So she asked another friend, the biological artist Jenna Sutela, to help her acquire slime mold and let the mold choose the words she would vocalize. “We made something like a bingo board with a few key phrases from the poems, and put the slime mold in each corner and let them grow over the board,” Pramuk says. She took photos of the board for seven days, tracking the mold’s path, and then created a visual map that she used for her vocal sessions. “I was limited to go only in the direction that the slime mold went, and only to adjacent words,” she says. “It was like a randomized limitation system, and a collaboration with this incredible creature.”

When asked what kind of imagined place Pramuk wishes to evoke with Hymnal, her answer feels both extemporaneous and deeply considered. “It’s some kind of amoebic, multiversal, mega-polyhedron, time-lapse, surreal deep-dream interpolation of the entire Earth and surrounding cosmos,” she offers with a smile, aware of her ambitions but unafraid to dim them. Many of her favorite musical productions are similarly evocative of specific moods or locales—sounds that transport you. Pramuk chose to talk about particular songs that act as microcosms of their corresponding albums. Her list includes all-time icons, undervalued pioneers, and underground revolutionaries, offering a skeleton key to further understand Pramuk’s singular sound.

Elysia Crampton: “After Woman (For Bartolina Sisa)” from Demon City (2016)

Producers: Elysia Crampton and Rabit

Lyra Pramuk: This song is materially, emotionally, and politically essential for me. I saw Ellie, now known as Chuquimamani-Condori, play some of the tracks from Demon City in Berlin during that album campaign. I feel connected to this track in particular because one of my really good friends is Bolivian American, as is Chuquimamani-Condori, and both of them have honored Bartolina Sisa in their work. Bartolina Sisa was a Bolivian revolutionary who was one of the key figures of the resistance during the Spanish colonization. The Spanish colonizers cut up her body parts and put them on stakes in all the villages as a sign of power over the resistance forces in Bolivia. There’s a lot of grief in dedicating your work to a figure who was disgraced, publicly humiliated, and disposed of in that way. But there’s also the power of Chuquimamani-Condori’s revolutionary energy, and the way the samples are collaged in this track is beautifully poetic, politically powerful, and technically vast. I think of electronic music as an imaginal space to birth new worlds and create speculative fictions, and this track feels like the speculative revenge of Bartolina Sisa on the forces who killed her. I wouldn’t have made Hymnal in exactly the same way that I did if it were not for Chuquimamani-Condori’s revolutionary storytelling and sound on this track.

Gigi: “Abay” from Illuminated Audio (2003)

Producer: Bill Laswell

Illuminated Audio is a unique project that saw the experimental producer Bill Laswell remixing Ethiopian singer Gigi’s self-titled 2001 album into a dubby dreamscape. What drew you to this record?

I’m generally very inspired by North and East African music, from Senegal over to Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Ethiopia. It has these underpinnings of revolution and worship and ecstasy all rolled into one. I’m intuitively pulled to it. And Gigi’s voice is so pure and so beautiful.

I knew the original album very well and listened to it for many years, then I discovered this remix album five years ago. It’s a very ambitious rework concept that makes total sense to me. It’s connected with dub techno and Basic Channel, and, as a Berliner who came up in Berghain, it’s a sound world that I understand intuitively. It’s in the way the music is deconstructed and reassembled, but there’s just so much air in it. There’s also a strong harmonic and melodic flow in it that makes it feel like it’s its own work. Steve Reich is one of my favorites, and it reminds me a lot of his work too, but with more African and dubby sensibilities. It’s very much a world. It’s music you can live in.

Björk: “All Neon Like” from Homogenic (1997)

Producers: Björk and Mark Bell

Björk’s music is so central to me, to an indescribable level. When I discovered her work at age 15, and especially Homogenic, I felt like she was someone who really understood me. It felt like a contemporary form of folk music that could coexist in a pop world. This album changed me so much—it was very fundamental to my understanding of possibility and this union of the electronic and the ancient.

I later learned that she worked with Mark Bell on this record, which helps give it this incredible finesse and power. He was putting a lot of the percussion loops through guitar pedal rigs and doing live automations on Homogenic, because Björk wanted it to sound like volcanoes.

“All Neon Like” is one of the only tracks on the record where strings were not at the center. It’s almost like she goes to the top of the mountain for a moment, and you can see the sky again, and you can feel the mountains under you, but you’re in this different biome. The different spectra of sounds in that track are so strong that it makes me wish some of the other tracks were mixed differently on the record: It’s one of my great frustrations with Homogenic that the strings are not louder. That’s why I made the strings so fucking loud on Hymnal—I’ve listened to so many recordings of strings in so many different genres, I can assure you that the strings in my album are some of the loudest recordings of strings ever made.

Ennio Morricone: “Come Maddalena” from the Maddalena Soundtrack (1971)

Producer: Ennio Morricone

I love music that carries complex timescales. And in this soundtrack there is this precision and minimalism to some of the arrangements and the vocals—even to the drum kit—where you start to feel this imposition of technology and electronic instruments and sequencers ramping up. It feels like Rome in the ’50s and a premonition of the ’80s, even though it came out in 1971; there’s a Catholic sensibility that you would get in old world Italy alongside this propulsion of modernity and sexiness and new fashion and movement and airplanes. It’s this beautiful balance in the way that it’s produced, this coexistence of modernity and the past and grief and emotion and sentimentality and possibility.

Kyoka: “Rollin’ & Tumblin’” from Is (Is Superpowered) (2014)

Producers: Frank Bretschneider and Robert Lippok

I discovered Kyoka when I was working at Ableton, and they did an interview with her around the release of her album Is (Is Superpowered). It was released on the label Raster-Noton, which is known for very clean and technical sound exploration, which I love. But then here comes this very chaotic Japanese girl who’s bringing in so many sounds, field recordings, and genre references. I’m really a pluralist and a post-modernist at the end of the day, and I was inspired to see her making such technically brilliant, emotive, powerful work that is complex and nuanced on that label. There’s this giddiness to the album that I find really generative. When you’re in it you think: This music is possible and fun, so life can be possible and fun, too. The sound design is just killer. Everything is really groovy, but also elegant and refined—it’s like a party you want to be at.

Carl Stone: “Ganci” from Stolen Car (2020)

Producer: Carl Stone

Carl Stone is a 72-year-old pioneer of avant-garde computer music known for sampling sources like pop music and turning them into something mesmerizing and strange. What is your relationship to his work?

I’m a very process-oriented, systems-based, classically trained artist, and I love how Carl Stone works in a very tight, process-oriented way, where he’ll work with one sample for a whole track. I love hearing what bounteous fractal beauty can come out of this extreme limitation. His deconstructions take pop music to these weird places, which is soothing for me. I feel very alienated from most pop music, but the transformations that he makes with it almost feels religious—it feels more like classical than pop sometimes.

He’s drawing on the best of the material of pop, which is all of the money and time that goes into the sound design to make it so shiny. From a materialist perspective, pop music is like this wonderful marble, and he hews it to his own desires. Even the name of the record, Stolen Car, it’s like, OK, I’m gonna jack this and do my own shit with it. He’s very under-appreciated as a composer because of what he’s sampling. It feels like people weren’t ready for him in the ’70s and ’80s, but now his work makes so much sense. He should have his flowers. I want to work with him, too.

Andy Stott: “Sleepless” from Luxury Problems (2012)

Producer: Andy Stott

This track is like haunted electricity. I’m a very lunar person, and it’s very lunar too; the synesthetic feeling I get with it is very black-silver. It’s like a bad dream but also kind of sexy. It’s one of several things on my list that hits a dub-tech-industrial vibe. I was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in West Central Pennsylvania, which is this post-industrial landscape, so this aesthetic speaks to me automatically. The track also has the same atmosphere as so many of the abandoned industrial spaces that you go to club in Berlin—it feels like you’re in some kind of factory. This song perfectly embodies a lot of my experience of the energy of being in places like Berghain. It’s very well-produced in the sense that it evokes something greater than this world, which is ultimately what I’m looking for in music.