‘I don’t want to be a perfectly automated cyborg bitch’: an Interview with Lyra Pramuk

Talah Anderson

January 14, 2021

Flights

Lyra Pramuk is a singer, composer-producer and performance artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her genre-bending ‘futuristic folk music’ draws heavily on vocal sampling, looping and synthesis to create intimate, confronting and otherworldly soundscapes. In the last year, Lyra’s international performance schedule has taken her across Europe and to North America, including for collaborations with Holly Herndon, Colin Self and Donna Huanca.

In what follows, Lyra speaks with Cambridge alum Talah Anderson, a scholar of Assyriology and Biblical Studies, about queer mythologies, digital lifeworlds and journeys of becoming.

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TA:

As a scholar of Mesopotamian mythic traditions, I’m fascinated by how, throughout history, people have constructed and repurposed myths and narratives in their own lives. So I’ll start by asking, what are your personal mythologies?

LP:

Like a lot of queer kids, I grew up exploring myself through video game avatars— taking on other bodies, different identities, different names. I was really into online games where you could actually put those identities into practice with others.

TA:

YES! It’s interesting to think of online video games as a kind of arena within which everyone is practicing self-presentation.

LP:

If a light particle going through a wall with two slits is watched, it behaves as a wave instead of as a particle. All matter, all consciousness, when watched, performs; the sheer act of being in a virtual space with other consciousness, other watchers, legitimises your experience of performing your identity. If I’m in my bedroom sulking, drawing pictures, wishing I could be something, it’s very different from going online and saying, “hey, this is who I am.”

TA:

It’s really beautiful, and I did the same thing growing up. From the ages of 13 or 14, every moment I had the chance, I was immersed in similar online realms. What games did you play?

LP:

My favorite was Diablo 2.

TA:

Tell me about it.

LP:

It’s a super fast-paced melee combat type game, an ascension of power and descent into Hell. The game takes place in five acts, the first time you play, it’s a swamp town. Then a mystical desert, totally dry. The third, Amazonian marshes. And so on. When you get to the higher levels, it’s about the armour you have, but the game also becomes super strategic for your character— which influenced my psyche on a deep level. I approached my music training and interest in composition in a very strategic way. You play a game for 10 hours a day for 3 years, it changes how you perceive yourself in the world. It’s fucked up.

TA:

Speaking of armour— there’s a myth, I’m obsessed with it. It’s called Inana’s Descent.

LP:

I know Inana!

TA:

OH! So Inana is the Mesopotamian goddess par excellence. She’s like, the one.

LP:

She’s it.

TA:

She’s literally it! In Inana’s Descent she travels to the Netherworld, but in order to do so she puts on her mascara, her crown, her jewellery, all different things, and only then does she travel towards the gates. Similarly for queer people, I feel like there is often a period of preparation and garbing before experiences of journeying, movement or fleeing.

LP:

A couple of years after I moved to Berlin I began medically transitioning and I started an embodied practice of clubbing. I thought about the game so much at that time. Some things I would wear to the club were like armour. There were so many parallels.

TA:

Right! In many ways, whether its dressing for the club or other parts of your life, you can pick up an item and be like, this object gives me power.

LP:

Totally. What games were you playing?

TA:

I played Runescape.

LP:

I also played Runescape. There was a lot of the same mythology in Diablo 2.

TA:

What were your avatars like?

LP:

My favourite character in Diablo 2 was the sorceress, the mage. In Diablo 3 all the characters have both genders, but when I was a kid they didn’t. There were three girl classes. Of course, I was playing girl characters.

TA:

Without saying.

LP:

Obviously. The sorceress was really powerful, and she had a spiritual connection. Connected to the earth, the storms, the sky. She controlled fire and lightning and ice. Ice was my thing.

TA:

Do you think the spirit of the sorceress is present in your music?

LP:

I was super into the mythologies of X-Men as a kid, with Storm and Jean Grey, this cosmic, elemental power. With singing and my body and my voice, through meditating and listening and feeling my body, I’ve definitely tried to channel the elemental power of the supernatural and mythological heroines I admired as a kid.

TA:

What are you hoping to manifest in your music, through calling that power into being?

LP:

I do a lot of live looping where I put vocals together on the spot. It’s a process of letting sound out by paying attention to what is coming together, as its own objective thing separate from me. That’s basically how I make music. Rather than contriving some super simple personal narrative and saying that my person is the most interesting thing, I’m much more interested in the invisible forces that compel me— and the world around me.

I’m looking for ascension, vacating my body, crafting an experience whereby anybody in the audience has no choice but to feel totally empty, where no amount of shit-talk or argument or irony or apathy can even cut through the space. That’s the idea at least. It’s a seduction of losing yourself in devotion, a trance-like state that we get in house and techno music. It’s being totally subsumed and turned to ashes, and being renewed.

TA:

So it’s a creation through an induced chaotic state, a kind of infinite expanse.

LP:

A primordial-ness.

TA:

Right.

LP:

In terms of the personal mythology I want to put into the world, it’s also about paying attention to the ghosts or spectres of political or social apathies: social media, violence, neglect— and knowing the one thing I can control is my body and actions. I can propose an alternative to things in society that I don’t agree with, through using my body as a site of resistance.

TA:

So by proposing an alternative, would you say that your music is a call to step into its universe?

LP:

Yeah. When I’m working on music, it's also a world that I’m building, one that’s implicitly understood to be different from the one we’re living in. it’s something that you can step into, and is going to end eventually, whether it’s a concert or song or anything.

TA:

So it’s also a kind of storytelling then? What kind of stories do you hope to tell with your music?

LP:

You could listen just to the music of a TV series and still get the emotional transferences. My music is a lot about those emotional transferences. A dramaturgy or charting of “emotional landscapes,” as Björk told us. I don’t use a lot of lyrics, there are few words in my work. Right now I’m interested in what music can communicate without written language, the communicative potential of the voice as its own abstract instrument. Words can be so overbearing. Language demands space.

I love songs with amazing lyrics, they’re a magical thing. I can listen to “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell and repeatedly find such a sense of spirituality in that union of her voice and the text. There’s a redemptive sense of mysticism. But my body doesn’t want to stand in front of an audience and claim text. Not right now. Our relationship with text has also shifted drastically. The book, the record, the article, the screenshot, has become more important than anything that happens in oral or shared space, but that wasn’t always the case. And I don’t think it should be.

TA:

Many of the earliest texts written down in history, some biblical texts, various ancient myths, have been understood to have derived from older oral histories. But in the process, inevitably some aspects of the original stories were lost, redirected, or overturned. You’re working on your album, how do you feel about the distilling process?

LP:

when we’re able to let things go, we’re able to actually do. I can’t remember where I read this, but it’s a sentiment I share: I’ll have to forgive myself for the version of the thing that actually comes into existence, because it’ll feel like a failure. The thing I set out to create will never come to exist. I will fail to realize my vision on some level. But I can forgive myself, and love myself, for the work and craft that went into the process. I can love the act. And I know I cannot control what other people will think about my work.