In the Eye of the Beholder Lyra Pramuk

i understand that totally—if it’s ok with you, i would use lowercase as much as possible as it helps me to do exactly that!

i really appreciate that. my musical and artistic process has been one of building such an intimacy with myself and my recorded voice, and as with everyone’s first release to some degree it always feels extremely vulnerable. but i guess my music is especially vulnerable. i love the reference to spheres, thinking now of Kepler and music of the spheres and generally planetary bodies all around us!

that’s sweet! my process in building a song is usually extremely intuitive; it’s usually not until many months later that i begin to be able to piece together a sense of what a thing is. in the case of “Tendril,” emotionally i think there was a core human emotion to confront, maybe you could say feeling only “half.” the song itself arose from a melody i sang into my phone while travelling one summer. one which had a central chord progression attached to it which i then developed further. and in the end, the harmonic progression carried it to this sense of flight and love, it was all coded there in an instant, one day at the piano.

i find it really relevant, actually. i think i can be emotionally quite detached, so i am always thinking about the world as much as i am thinking about my personal life. as my life is not detached from the world, it is embedded within its complexity. to the detriment of so many, our society does not acknowledge and nurture a sense of wholeness which is already always there, within each of us. i think i am starting from a place of acknowledging that our society is broken and projects onto us feelings of brokenness, but my true belief is that everyone is whole. i try to foster a great sense of empathy with all people and life.

i think so. growing up in a small town in rural pennsylvania, especially as a queer child, isolation is not only inherent to the place. often, i chose to avoid conflict; to hide out in the music rehearsals spaces or isolate myself further at home and in a kind of virtual life on the internet, trying to build a sense of safety for myself. so i could thrive without being directly confronted with conflict, homophobia, or hatred. in some ways, i shied away from expressing myself in those days. i was smart, so i performed in a way that could appease my bullies. i wore masculinity as an armor, which began to feel very heavy after many years. further i think, solitude is an essential aspect of spiritual experience in many cultures. i’ve read a lot of spiritual and mystical poetry over the years, and all leads to solitude, and the rich mystery that one can find within oneself. it has been very affirming to practice solitude, to practice meditation through my artistic practice, as a mode of continuous becoming.

i did perform a lot as a way of experimenting with and presenting myself. playing with my body and presentation in theater, for example. at the same time, i was singing in many choirs and playing in orchestras and found my own sense of sonic spirituality in those spaces, which felt entirely my own. a similar kind of sensual spirituality, which you can also feel throughout fountain. by the time i decided to study music at university, i was long gone in the music spiral haha. but as it is, i think i spent most of my life masking to appease others. what the “others” wanted, who knows, i didn’t really know who i was in that basic impulse. it was a form of self-preservation. and so, in my artistic and compositional practice of the last years, i’ve really been trying to build something that is, yes, still performative, but something that feels intimately my own, something that feels like me. a message that i feel i can get behind broadcasting to a public. i think also part of this (sometimes) lonely, personal, and compositional process has been to try to build musical materials and affects which ask more questions rather than posing answers.

i’ve spent many of the last six or seven or so years performing my own wounds. before that also performing the wounds of others in a more classical context. i’ve been really interested in exploring the darker aspects of human emotion, because i think it’s important to be able to process and understand and move beyond such emotions.

in terms of musical resistance, i was fairly straight-laced in my teens, but i began to express musical resistance in listening to harder electronic music or female punk musicians. eventually also in my music conservatory, by performing pop and experimental music by living composers that was more challenging than the main repertoire i was expected to sing. when one is expressing painful things, it can feel really embodied and visceral, it’s not a joke to express traumatic stuff.

diagnosing what, exactly, in that sense?

this all resonates with me. i think it’s so important to find language, reasons, and analogues for what it is we are doing when we show up to create. i am very interested in cultivating and deepening my sense of intention. as you’ve just expressed, i often arrive at physical or emotive truths in my musical work that i may still never come up with in words. i really have a great respect for musical language as its own coherence, its own bundle of rational articulations. i don’t necessarily feel that that emotive musical information intends to find its best life in written language; i wonder what is gained by allowing music its own such agency. words are helpful to get closer to it, but words ultimately always fail me as far as music is concerned. that’s why the idea of improvisation is very close to me as well. so many times, i put that state or that immediacy into a recording, so i don’t lose that connection to the state i am in. in a way the collected body of recordings, the assembled tracks, become for me a kind of curated multiplicity of states.

haha, yes! aesthetically, i was thinking a lot about those hi-fi aesthetics, but i think there’s also many different types of lo-fi material produced and scattered throughout, so i really feel this kind of “high-low” interplay in the aesthetics of it. for this project, i was really interested to see how much i could blur the fleshiness of the voice with very specific kinds of processing, which would hit my ear in a way that supports ambiguity or even invisibility. when it comes down to it, a lot of the recordings you hear were made on the fly or in diy-environments with practically no regard to acoustics or recording practice. in that way, i feel my process as something messy, or punk, or somehow aligning with folk music. and then mixing those bits with more carefully recorded audio and sampled material. i think i was very conservative in a way when considering processing, and in some other ways threw in some bits of electronic processing which are not conservative at all :)

i use that word in quite a personal way. i think sometimes we hear newer digital tools as more progressive and less localized, whereas methods and tools coming from the 20th century, from pre-digital formats and genres, can offer a sense of nostalgia or geographical place. not to be reductive, but those are just some associations that come to me.

i feel when i perform these songs almost like it’s wind whirling around me, howling, bubbling up. water and wind. it feels very airy!

oh wow, that’s a whole world. are you talking about skin or make-up or clothes or anything?

i have a more conceptual, over-arching kind of idea. i’m in a relationship with beauty and it’s complicated.

beauty is one of those words that carries neoliberal, capitalistic, philosophical, cultural…so many different connotations. as you mentioned: spheres within spheres. i find beauty in everything. which is to say, i don’t want to carry around a limited, instagrammable, face-filtered, vacationified, greco-roman, western and anthropocentric understanding of beauty. we technologically-enmeshed cybernetic humans are arguing for social equity and a redefinition of beauty within human culture at the same time. Laboria Cuboniks Xenofeminist Maifesto says “let 100 genders bloom” and i feel the same way about beauty. I want to eat ugly vegetables that the supermarket doesn’t want to sell me. beauty secret: it’s in your perception and it’s an opportunity unfolding for you! right! now!

beauty is sculpted by culture and i think we need to be actively changing the culture.

well of course if you have cancerous moles have them removed and don’t let them kill you. i actually have a lot of moles too and as long as they aren’t killing me, i really like them.

i do not believe that biology is our destiny. it’s a lot for an iMessage thread, but we don’t just produce technology we sort of “are” technology and design. whatever becomes possible becomes us. that has always been the story and this isn’t new. there is no “natural human body”—we are strange miracles.

access to cosmetics, fashion, medical procedures, etc. is an intersectional and class issue. not everyone has access to the same resources obviously. but we all have desires and wishes and dreams and that is the primal urge of our being—to sculpt, change, adapt, present ourselves. all of us want that freedom. but to answer your question, i love to spray rose water on my face and neck.