About three years ago, musician and former biologist Tarun Nayar kickstarted a supposedly novel musical fad on TikTok. By sticking electrodes into mushrooms, he collected the mycelia’s bioelectrical signals and used them to excite modular synthesizers into oblique ambient music. This sort of algorithmic composition had already been done before with greater success – Mileece I’Anson’s poignant botanical experiments come to mind among many others – but Nayar’s framing struck the social media jackpot with an increasingly eco-aware public. Aesthetically, the music was drab, the result of a gimmicky approach that took away artistic agency by relying excessively on biological stochastic processes.
Listening to Lyra Pramuk’s anything but dreary new album Hymnal on her recently launched imprint pop.soil, I’m reminded of this curious episode. Not because of the Berlin-based US musician’s use of slime mould, affectionately known as The Blob, to map and select words from Nadia Marcus’s poems for the album’s lyrics, but because her deliberate, fully present process resulted in the sort of opulent, heady music that you’d actually expect mushrooms to make.
From the very first notes of opener ‘Rewild’, the music betrays an intoxicatingly organic aura. Its tendrils grow from Sonar Quartett’s bulbous strings and Pramuk’s glitching, sibilant, and succulent vocal fragments into a swirling symphony that evokes a fading echo of a delirious night spent clubbing. It sounds like the comforting feeling of burying your toes in fresh dirt; like the mushrooming of flora and fauna into impossibly saturated neon colours; like the kind of turbulent transformation that Jeff VanderMeer envisages in his novels.
Throughout, Pramuk’s approach to singing is downright mesmerising. I’d dare call it ASMR-ish, but compared to the anaesthetising effects of trigger sounds and sights, her approach is much more compelling and purposeful. As if tasting each syllable, she rolls words on her tongue, then stretches them across her palate and lips. “Licking the soil, licking the sun, affixed,” she sings on ‘Meridian’, the juicy delivery pressing against a melancholy arpeggio. “Simply,” she enunciates over a blue backdrop on ‘Incense’, turning the word into a hiss. With each repetition, she reorders the phrases, mutates her inflection, and considers each sound’s place carefully, as if caught in a fit of glossolalia, until the voice becomes not her own, shifting in pitch and breaking down.
Pramuk’s extended singing techniques inevitably invite comparison with Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, while her circular, cyclical compositions lead back to minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley – whom she namechecks herself. However, the fourteen pieces on Hymnal belong to a world of their own. If anything, it’s Pramuk’s DJing side that takes hold. Working on the album, she processed all recordings into stems, then fashioned them into constructs that yearn for the dancefloor, even if the instrumentation holds none of club music’s usual tropes.
Case in point, ‘Gravity’ moves from a joyous explosion of glow stick electronica into banging disco. ‘Swallow’ is all melancholy downtempo vibes for the after-party hours. On ‘Umbra’, ghostly beats remain suspended in the air, casting a shadow over lovely textural ripples. Finally, ‘Ending’ closes the album with a glorious sequence of spiccato bows punctuating a sweeping glissando and Gregorian chant-like vocalisations. Considering the path that we’re on, it might be too late for Hymnal to reconnect us with the Earth and nature, but it might yet serve as a blueprint if we ever get to rebuild.
