Alif Hilal, the artist formerly known as Lyra Pramuk, records a FADER DJ mix

Alif Hilal has recorded a mix for The FADER, and it comes with a name change behind it. The Pennsylvania-born, Berlin-based vocalist, producer and composer recorded as Lyra Pramuk until she converted to Islam and took the name she now uses. The music she is best known for is nothing like what is on this mix.

Her records are built almost entirely from her own voice. On 2020's Fountain she stacked it into compositions like Tendril and Witness that move with their own momentum; on 2025's Hymnal she set it against thick banks of strings. She then handed those pieces to a set of producers including Laurel Halo and DjRUM for Hymnal (Resung), which is closer to the terrain this mix occupies.

DJing is a newer part of the practice and she is candid about the timeline. She played casual sets around a decade ago at Berlin bars including Ficken3000 and Mobel Olfe, and later one at Sanatorium of Sound in Poland, but counts her first official club set as the one she played for Ohm's La Casita party in Berlin this past May, after buying decks for home earlier in the year. She calls herself a raver at heart, and says DJing has become central to how she thinks about production, composition and musical storytelling.

The recording itself is not a studio mix. It is an excerpt from a live set she played in June 2026 with Opificio and Cosmogram in Venice, Italy, where she was on for almost three hours; what The FADER published is the middle portion of it, recorded in what she describes as an extremely hot room with no air conditioning. Her own summary of the result is "DIY, steamy, sexy, intimate."

She describes the programming as ungenred pluralism revolving around a modular continuum of techno and house, which turns out to be an accurate label rather than a grandiose one. The published tracklist runs to 27 records and moves from a Ricardo Villalobos variation on goat and Basement Jaxx through Tzusing, Loraine James, Donato Dozzy, James Bangura and Al Wootton, then out through Mason and Princess Superstar's Perfect (Exceeder), M.I.A.'s XR2, a Paula Temple remix of Peaches, Dave Clarke, Djrum and a closing run of DJ BABATR and DJ Figo.

That last stretch is the argument the set is making. Pulling Venezuelan raptor house and Egyptian mahraganat into the same hour as Berlin techno is a deliberate position, and she states it directly: she says it matters to her artistically and politically to represent the history of dance music as a form of radical resistance, and to tell a story about the musical diversity that exists across places and eras. She calls it a kind of research into contemporary folk music.

Her sense of where she comes from is equally specific. She describes herself as a child of Berlin and Berghain, while feeling closest to the European experimental festival circuit of Unsound, CTM, Atonal, Rewire and Draaimolen. The DJs she names as inspirations run from Objekt and DJ Nobu to Mica Levi and Lechuga Zafiro, which is the same spread the mix itself covers.

Artists arriving at the decks from somewhere else has been a recurring story this year: Bjork played a DJ set at the eclipse festival she staged in Iceland, and Arcade Fire's frontman lined up a rare DJ set in Los Angeles. No release under the new name is announced. More electronic coverage is on the hub.