Album Review: Fountain by Lyra Pramuk

When Lyra Pramuk was a child, her parents insisted she go to two different churches every Sunday. It made for a long day and so, as she explained on a recent podcast, she joined a choir at one of them as a way to kill time. Singing soon grew into a way of life and, as she got older, led her to classical training. At university, however, she felt conflicted by the expectation to pursue a traditional operatic or choral career path; inspired by the pop artists she listened to outside of class (Björk, M.I.A., Missy Elliott), she was interested in using her voice as an instrument in more experimental ways.

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Contemporary technology's potential to disrupt binaries--real and artificial, male and female, past and present--is being explored by a number of classically trained musicians. Holly Herndon combined an AI entity called Spawn with choral singing to produce orchestral productions that blurred the distinction between synthesised and organic sound. Also rooted in the Berlin avant-garde scene, Colin Self uses his voice as an interface to explore queer relationships.

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