There are no instruments on Alif Hilal's first album. Fountain, released in March 2020 on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community under her former name, Lyra Pramuk, was assembled entirely from her own voice: sung, sampled, pitched and stacked until it did the work of bass, percussion and choir. Almost none of it used words. The premise was austere, but the record owed as much to the collective euphoria of Berlin's raves as to the conservatoire, and that tension has driven everything since.
Hilal was born in 1990 and grew up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, singing in church choirs and musical theatre before training as a vocalist at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. She later settled in Berlin and describes herself as a "child of Berlin and Berghain". The technique is classical; the sense of time is not. Her label places her alongside Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson, a lineage of process, repetition and the voice as an instrument in its own right.
What separates her from most vocal experimentalists is how readily she gives the material away. In 2021 she handed Fountain to fourteen artists, among them Caterina Barbieri, KMRU, Ben Frost, Eris Drew, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Hudson Mohawke and Gabber Modus Operandi, for the remix album Delta. Alongside it she released a free sample plug-in built from the album's vocal sounds, so that anyone could compose with her voice.
Hymnal, which followed in June 2025 on 7K! and her own new imprint pop.soil, carried that openness into the writing itself. The Berlin string ensemble Sonar Quartett played arrangements by Francesca Verga, which Hilal then sampled and rebuilt. The words came from poems by Nadia Marcus, selected with the help of a slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, whose growth in a setting by the artist Jenna Sutela served as a visual score, a chance procedure in the spirit of John Cage. Vocals recorded in a cabin in the Dolomites were re-amplified inside a Venetian church. The album was presented as her own book of worship songs.
That description turned out to be literal. On 5 June 2026 came Hymnal (Resung), with reworks by Djrum, Verraco, Laurel Halo with John Tejada, Dumama and Tarta Relena, plus one of her own named after dhikr, the Islamic practice of remembrance. A few days later she announced that she had converted to Islam and taken a new name: Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and Hilal, the crescent moon that opens the lunar month. She wrote that she had been taught that "everything is worship".
The same year she bought XDJs and began playing club sets, counting one at Ohm's La Casita party in Berlin in May as her first official outing, followed by a set of almost three hours in Venice in June. She describes DJing as research into contemporary folk music, and dance music as a history of resistance. It is a consistent position: the voice, the hymn and the dancefloor all treated as things held in common.
