STILL LIFE

Italian performer, singer and electronic music producer Lyre announces STILL LIFE, a new work exploring embodiment, vulnerability and power dynamics through a deeply personal and layered form of writing. More than a conventional album, the project unfolds as a space for emotional and political reflection, where sound becomes a tool for listening, proximity and transformation.

Moving between experimental electronics, spoken word, atmospheric environments and minimalist structures, the record investigates how power operates through inherited roles, social expectations, gendered experience and the subtle forms of violence that often remain invisible precisely because they have become normalized. Personal memories intertwine with broader collective narratives, while recurring female figures—mothers, daughters, silent witnesses and archetypes inherited from family memory, religion and collective imagination—become vehicles through which the album reflects on motherhood, sacrifice, expectation and the transmission of female roles across generations. The Madonna, which also appears on the album cover, functions as a cultural motif rather than a religious statement, embodying these tensions and their enduring resonance.

At its core lies the idea of listening as a radical act: not the presumption of fully understanding another person’s experience, but the willingness to be affected by it, embracing discomfort, uncertainty and the destabilization of one’s own perspective.

The earliest stages of the album took shape during Ndel Bait – Essential Residency II, an artistic residency organized by NeMu (Neutral Mutation), the platform founded by Italian composer and sound artist Vito Gatto. Originally conceived as material for a live performance, the residency became the experimental ground from which many of the record’s themes and sonic directions emerged.

Built around a constant friction between fluid, organic materials—voices, harmonies and orchestral textures—and harsher rhythmic forces that interrupt or constrain their movement, STILL LIFE mirrors the tension between vulnerability and control, freedom and discipline, connection and domination. Through vocal manipulation, granular synthesis and hybrid electronic processes, Lyre constructs an intimate yet unstable sonic landscape, where emotional fragility and physical presence become inseparable, inviting listeners to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it.