by Dom Lepore (@dom.lepore)
To deem Hymnal as a “special album you don’t often come across” may be a tired platitude, but it’s necessary for a work this complex and technical. The grandiosity of American composer Lyra Pramuk’s latest record is owed to its variegated synthesis of classical, folk, and techno sensibilities. Pramuk extends her avant-garde a cappella from her debut, Fountain, to further inspire transcendence. The former album’s sole use of her digitally contorted and layered voice, coalescing into spacious soundscapes, distantly laid the foundation for the newly naturalistic and protean Hymnal.
Pramuk forgoes classical convention as the decadent strings, courtesy of Berlin’s Sonar Quartett, are woven intently among her breathy, leaping vocals. Equipped with a CDJ, Pramuk rummages through these samples in a manner evoking techno’s insistent rhythms. Aesthetically, Hymnal is a long way from that sound, but the constancy of the harmonic, buoyant melodies is what’s similar. The journey undertaken on such a dancefloor endeavour is spiritually channeled in this ever-flowing pool of jubilant rhythms.
The opening passage, “Rewild,” welcomes this flourishing. As the wooden chordophones and Lyramuk’s voices enter the fore, they all climactically metamorphose into dazzling, dense kaleidoscopic sound. Much of the album’s first half is brooding and trepidatious – “Render” and “Incense” sound especially so as the coalescence of manipulated samples becomes towering and harrowing. It’s almost an allusion to the unease of the unexplainable in human life – a particular point of exploration for Pramuk, underpinning this marvelous album’s existence.
It isn’t until the centrepiece “Meridian” that Pramuk’s syllables take on full articulation as a mantra: “Licking the sun / Licking soil.” She invokes a sense of oneness with nature, like the near-infrared rays and soil beneath one’s feet. Perhaps a response to today’s concurrent manmade crises, and an invitation to recede into the natural world that came before us. The theory and philosophy Pramuk cites for encompassing Hymnal can be viewed as a gesture to detach from our screens and all, and instead retread into organics, to be grateful for what we have outside of those human stressors.
Hymnal’s latter half largely veers into more spirited territory – “Crimson” features angular acoustic riffage, whilst the sweet, cursive “Solace” segues into the deft polyphonic catharsis, “Ending,” petering out sparsely with Pramuk’s breaths. This brilliant body of work, created with meticulous maximalism, requires attentive listening but can be enjoyed independently of the theory. Hymnal is beaming with life, as its creator Pramuk has sought to invite listeners, not alienate them. Allow yourself to embrace her web of disparate, accessible musical styles, and kindly let its nature sing to you.