Lyra Pramuk at The White Hotel

Berlin-based vocalist, producer and composer Lyra Pramuk returns to the UK with her new live show, landing at The White Hotel this summer. Fusing experimental electronics with folk, gospel, contemporary classical and club sonics, she creates music that feels both ancient and futuristic – drawing on ritual, mythology, and speculative imagination to build new forms of sonic communion.

Best known for her voice – sampled, stretched, and reconfigured into ecstatic polyphonies – Pramuk creates what she calls “devotional music”. It’s not religious, but it is spiritual – a practice rooted in connection, care, and collective transformation. “Music has been a sacred practice throughout human history”, she says. “It’s a socially connective ritual between humans, animals, and the Earth”.

Following 2020’s Fountain, Pramuk’s second album Hymnal deepens this vision. Drawing on art, biology, poetry and cultural theory, she stitches together a bold, process-driven soundworld in which strings from the Sonar Quartett entwine with re-amped field recordings and ritualistic vocals, evoking both medieval ceremony and future ecologies. In it, you’ll hear the minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the avant-garde vocal storytelling of Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson, and the political and communal spirit of American folk and dance music.

The album’s lyrics, penned by American poet Nadia Marcus, became the starting point for a one-of-a-kind experiment: part poetic deconstruction, part interspecies collaboration. Working with artist Jenna Sutela, Pramuk fed distilled fragments of the text into a John Cage-inspired setup, where a slime mould traced its own pathways across the words, creating the visual score for her vocal improvisations. What was it Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park? “Life finds a way”?

Beyond the concept, Hymnal is a deeply physical listen. Pramuk’s primal voice loops into dense chorales or erupts in affective chants. Strings – whose evocative power stretch across musical traditions – shimmer and warp, shifting from ambient drones to sharp, rhythmic insistence. At times it’s sacred music refracted through a modular synth; at others, a fractured ghost of the dancefloor. Taken as a whole it plays like a personal book of worship – not to any deity, but to the Earth, the cosmos, and all living things.

Pramuk’s performances blur the boundaries between concert, ceremony and installation – immersive, emotionally charged spaces where sound becomes something you inhabit rather than just hear. Past shows have seen her collaborate with dancers, chamber musicians and visual artists to create multi-sensory works that feel devotional in the broadest sense. At The White Hotel – Salford’s own site of ritual – expect something intimate yet expansive: part prayer, part protest, part dancefloor séance.