Lyra Pramuk: Live in MAGMA SLIT

Join us for an evening with composer and artist Lyra Pramuk, the first in a series of performances held within the immersive installation Donna Huanca: MAGMA SLIT. Lyra’s set will take place on an auxiliary stage that Huanca designed for other artists to share their ideas on transcendence, meditation, and transformation. Lyra’s presence extends the long-term collaborative relationship and dialogue between the two artists. Costumed in a gown designed by Huanca, as well as body-painted according to the artist's instruction, Lyra and her songs will blend into and become part of the MAGMA SLIT universe. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

For Lyra Pramuk, devotion is ingrained in her futurist folk music that harnesses the power and giddiness of technology to present the human voice as an object of limitless possibility. A diligent student at the Eastman School of Music, she learned that her skills lay in breaking with and reinterpreting the traditions of the academically-pure classical music that she was expected to uphold. Her interests lay more in pop and opera, counting Björk, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, M.I.A, and Missy Elliot as inspirations - all artists who exemplify her mantra that “songcraft is a way of short-circuiting the structures we are sold as real differences in the world.” 

A deep embrace of a spirituality unconstrained by imposed orthodoxies drives her compositional and performance processes. Body and spirit enter trance states in live performances, both fully ensconced in the worlds she projects - worlds where every utterance can sparkle with flame and purpose, and sound is truly seen as an extension of our physical bodies and conscious desires.

Composed and arranged entirely from the sound of her own voice, Fountain, her debut on Bedroom Community, was hailed as “a potent religious text in praise of human vocality’s promise” (the Quietus). Fountain integrates the intimacies of the club, the emotional multitude of trans experiences, and the forbidding possibilities of social and physical technologies into “an excavation of her own body’s resonant possibilities” (Pitchfork), envisioning a post-human queer futurity. Her forthcoming compilation Delta showcases global interpretation of Fountain’s psyche, through reworking, recomposing, and reconstructing the source material, projecting them through the many lenses of her colleagues and collaborators.