by Kim Budd // Nov. 17, 2025
Two CDJs are arranged on the floor as I enter Lyra Pramuk’s Altbau in Schöneberg. They sit atop a large Berber carpet, lights blinking, USBs plugged in either side. Pramuk tells me she was up late the previous evening practicing for a DJ set at Semibreve Festival. We take a moment to navigate our place within the space and conversation, finding our footing around the decks. From this position they feel holy (everything does) and in dialogue with the cabinet of books they directly face. Each stack is its own constellation: fields of philosophy, queer theory, music, math, spirituality and astrology orbit one another, guarded by totems, wooden animals, candles and scriptures.
Music as devotion, as ritual and as a tether to the divine have long been part of the American, Berlin-based composer’s ethos, which was formed in her youth through singing in the church choir, and later expanded through experimental classical music and eventually, electronic music and rave culture. The unifying element that connects these cosmologies and continues to guide Pramuk’s music practice is the induced trance states they can create and the ritual of gathering in space.
Pramuk speaks with fluid elegance, moving through her timelines, lifelines and personal history; in less than 10 minutes she communicates decades of experiences—their interconnectedness to her identity and spirituality and how this has come to shape her musical practice. It is evident that synthesizing and translating knowledge—intellectual, embodied and spiritual—is a skill of hers, mirrored in the spoken word as well as vocalized through her complex and evocative music.
Pramuk’s voice is essentially her studio: a space for experimentation and improvisation, where knowledge or information is channeled, transmuted and sculpted—guided by cautious intuition. She speaks about how everything begins with the breath: the voice, vocal samples, vocal improvisation, voice strings and chanting, and how she uses technology as an intuitive extension and collaborator.
This process can be heard in ‘Fountain’ (2020), her critically acclaimed debut album composed entirely with Pramuk’s voice. On Bandcamp you can read countless comments of fans in awe of, and deeply moved by, Pramuk’s music, but perplexed with how it exists technically. There are many levels to how her distinct sound resonates with her audiences, beyond its technical sophistication and plethora of musical influences—from experimental classical to folk, techno or dub. Its intentionality cuts through a lot of inauthenticity in electronic music culture, and the music industry more generally today. Pramuk has noted the importance for her in upholding and honoring indigenous musical cultures, music that was made before the Third Western Industrial Revolution and engaging with the purpose music held in these cultures. Pramuk tells me ‘Fountain’ was “like a call to the cosmos” and that ‘Hymnal’ (2025), her second studio album, released in June, is about “embodiment” [ … ] “about connecting the galactic, the subatomic, to the collective, to the earth, on a micro, cellular level.”
I follow her lyrical gestures as she speaks of the philosophy of Sufism; her hands mimic the Sufi’s whirling—one representing the moon, the other the sun—as she describes how their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the unity of existence is reflected in her own appreciation for ecology, identity, ritual and mysticism. This concept of unity, of being and becoming, extends across every level of her musical production and performance: treating audio samples as living organisms or cells, recording them and asking: “Where does this want to go?” Allowing each sample to have agency, to evolve or transcend. Her deep reverence for the symbiosis between architecture, performer and audience, and the way technology and sound are emitted and received in space becomes tangible in her performances. When performing, Pramuk seems to be in communion with divine forces. She describes these not as concerts, but as collective rituals—sermons that de-center her as the performer everyone has come to see, and position her instead as more of a conduit curating a multi-sensory experience.
Her album ‘Hymnal’ is a cycle of grief and mourning, but also an offering of healing and hope. It feels as though it taps into a collective, unconscious mourning for the current state of the planet. Pramuk refers to the album as her attempt to sonify “some of the grief from the damage of the Earth wrought by racialized colonialism and capitalism,” and how this feels very connected to her own grief and mourning in trying to survive as a trans woman today. She shared an intimate moment when recording the vocals for ‘Hymnal’ in a friend’s recording studio in the Dolomites, while recovering from some surgeries: “I saw the scars on the earth of these mountains where the soil condition has diminished, and there are more storms now ripping the trees out that have been there for over 500 years, and I really felt that the scars I had, helping me to survive in a transphobic, white supremacist world, were somehow connected to the scars on these mountains. That is very real for me, in a cosmological way, and I wanted to express how that pain is not just my pain—it’s the world’s pain.”
‘Hymnal’ is a challenging album, but, like a good DJ set, you are held—in this context, by the jubilant symphony of strings performed by the Sonar Quartett. The album is cyclical and Pramuk tells me how CDJs became a part of her process when composing the album. It is composed like a one-hour DJ set, with tracks woven into each other, allowing for the possibility of space and time’s undoing—as on the dancefloor, or in a trance state.
I ask Pramuk where we should begin taking photographs. She suggests continuing to practice mixing, and we go from there. Pramuk begins mixing ‘Sadati’ by Asma Hamzoui, and her girl band Bnat Timbouktou, with Björk’s ‘Quicksand’. Asma Hamzoui is one of the first female Gnawa musicians, a spiritual Moroccan music that was traditionally reserved for male artists. As it coalesces with Björk’s words, “when you give up, you take away our future,” I am reminded of the conversation between Björk and Maggie Nelson in Nelson’s ‘Like Love’, where the two women discuss the possibility of new narratives in an imagined continuity, one that oppose the Western, patriarchal, one-sided relationship to nature, which has become framed as violent, passive or paralyzed by guilt in the face of ecological catastrophe. They recognize the necessity of grief and mourning for the state of the planet and hosting those negative feelings in order to move forward. They look to the art and culture of developing nations whose experience of the Industrial Revolution was more removed from the West’s, seeking other knowledge and stories in their art, literature and philosophy that offer alternatives—that offer hope.
Pramuk mentions the importance of mixing on a personal level, increasingly in her own practice and for the collective: “it’s the sonic architecture that propels the human spirit […] the continuation of live electronic music is like gardening compost for human souls.” The practice of DJing is part of that imagined continuity, mixing tracks puts them in dialogue with each other—provoking, stimulating and creating unimagined compositions that transcend what we expected or understood previously. Pramuk is among those artists boldly forging culture forward, offering hope and encouraging realities beyond those we have been sold by dominant culture—new narratives bound in self-liberation, collectivity, play, joy and healing.
We are near the end of our discussion at the piano, where Pramuk begins to improvise. It’s interesting how one can sense a conversation nearing closure without needing to verbalize it—the body has an intelligence that signals the natural ending of a cycle before conscious thought. I feel this moment approach as I glance up and see a poster mapping the lineage of distinguished electronic female artists. I smile, knowing she is one of them, as Pramuk finishes playing.
Artist Info
Performance Info
Zenner Saal
‘Analogue Foundation Presents Lyra Pramuk’
Performance: Thursday, Nov. 20; 7pm
Admission: € 35
dice.fm
Alt Treptow 15, 12435 Berlin, click here for map
