GauraVani.com » Press Releases

SRI Kirtan debuts at #10 on Billboard World Music

rasa.acharya — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:28:36 +0000

Congratulations to SRI Kirtan on the debut of their album Live Your Love which hit #10 on the Billboard World Music Chart!

The early success of the album is a testament to the quality and accessibility of their music. If you haven’t already, make sure to get a copy of Live Your Love available on the Mantralogy Store or on iTunes.

Those of you who have the album, please leave a comment on the iTunes or Amazon.com page to let other know how great this album is. Thank you again to all of you that purchased the album, you got kirtan on the charts!

New Putumayo CD features ‘Moods of Kirtan’!

Jahnavi — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:38:07 +0000

Check out the new Putumayo ‘Yoga’ compilation – a new mix from the popular world music record label created especially for yoga classes and meditation. Our track ‘Moods of Kirtan’ features alongside tracks from artists like Susheela Raman, Krishna Das, Niraj Chag and Sean Johnson & the Wild Lotus Band. We’re excited that they chose this track – one of our absolute favourites that really says what we’re all about: param vijayate shri krishna sankirtanam – long live kirtan! Here’s a beautiful video that Prananatha das in New Zealand made to go with the track. It features footage from the holy towns of Vrindavan and Mayapur in India, some of the most beautiful places in the world.

On the Putumayo website, you can listen to sample tracks as well as read more about this fantastic new release. Here’s what people are saying about it:

“…Over seventy minutes of sacred sound that tends toward the chill with … a throughline of the gorgeously lyrical.” – LA Yoga

“Kudos to Putumayo for maintaining such a high standard and delivering a yoga CD that will hopefully be the first of many.” – Common Ground

Gaura Vani featured in the Boston Globe

rasa.acharya — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:45:29 +0000

By Tripp Underwood
Globe Correspondent / September 18, 2009

Gaura Vani & As Kindred Spirits were featured in the music section of the Boston Globe on September 18th 2009. The article ran in the printed paper as well as their website.

Gaura Vani, a Hare Krishna musician who combines traditional Indian kirtan music with Western elements such as 12-string guitar, gospel choruses, and hip-hop rhythms, is a musical product of his environments.

Born in Los Angeles, Vani was sent to India at a young age to study sacred music by his Hare Krishna parents. Upon completing his studies he returned to the States, where he began combining spiritual Indian kirtans – a form of rhythmic, call-and-response chanting over various musical accompaniments – with the other music of his youth: rock, pop, and world music.

The result is a genre-defying hybrid of ancient Indian sacred music and modern Western styles. Sitars, mridanga drums, and chanted vocals meld smoothly with guitars and the occasional hip-hop vocal flow, all with clearly defined verses and choruses and a focus on melody not usually found in traditional Indian music.

And though his music contains deeply spiritual lyrics and a layering of styles that spans centuries and continents, Vani maintains a surprisingly simple interpretation of sacred music and its relationship to its audience.

“Kirtan is just the process of using chant and music to clean the heart,’’ he said from his home outside the nation’s capital. “It’s like an ancient can of Scrubbing Bubbles to clean our hearts and help figure out who we are beyond the body.’’

Comparing a 5,000-year-old form of meditation chanting to a modern-day bathroom cleaner may sound like an odd analogy, but it makes sense when coming from a cross-cultural artist like Vani, whose latest CD, “Ten Million Moons,’’ is gaining attention in spiritual music circles as well as in the secular world.

“Music is just an expression of the heart and soul,’’ he says. “All I’m doing is drinking from different springs and bringing together in my heart what seems natural.’’

Intentional or not, Vani’s eclectic style has allowed him to take his songs and message from Krishna temples and yoga studios to a wider range of audiences. In the past year Vani has performed at diverse venues for all types of music fans from backpacked Chicago indie rockers at Lollapalooza to hippies and modern primitives in the Nevada desert at Burning Man to a jubilantly dancing crowd at the Church of the Holy City in Washington, D.C., who had gathered to celebrate President Obama’s inauguration.

Vani and his band, As Kindred Spirits, bring their unique brand of kirtan music to Boston Common on Sunday. The performance is sponsored by the Boston chapter of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness to celebrate Rath Yatra, one of the most sacred holidays in the Hindu world.

The embracing of different cultures and musical styles is apparent not only in Vani’s music but also in his signing to Matrology, a subdivision of Equal Vision Records, a New York label best known for releasing punk rock and hard-hitting emo albums.

Ray Cappo, a yoga teacher and former punk musician who leads spiritual pilgrimages to India and now answers to the Krishna name Raghunath, says elements of the hardcore punk subculture and Hare Krishna teachings have far more in common than many realize. “A lot of people in the hardcore scene are very concerned with similar issues that occur in Krishna consciousness like anti-materialism, vegetarianism, and straight edge,’’ Raghunath says, referring to the cultural movement that eschews drugs and alcohol.

“Twenty-five years later that is how we still live our lives,’’ says Raghunath, formerly of the underground band Shelter, which combined Krishna-influenced lyrics with razor-sharp guitars and blistering drum beats. “Some things may have changed with time, but it’s a form of continual evolution, and in one sense it’s exactly what we were doing in the punk scene when we were teenagers.’’

Vani shares Raghunath’s belief that music inspired by spirituality should retain core elements but be able to evolve with the times and changing tastes of followers.

“Spiritual music is a living tradition . . . from ‘Johnny B. Goode’ to the Bad Brains,’’ says Vani. “It grows and is alive. The music we make is just a natural progression of that.’’

Read the entire article here.

Equal Vision Records Announces Mantralogy

rasa.acharya — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:33:47 +0000

This press release was just circulated:

In a move that returns one of the nation’s most reputable punk and hardcore labels to its roots, Equal Vision Records has announced the creation of its new label division, Mantralogy. The sub-label will showcase kirtan and a variety of other sacred and meaningful musics for both the flourishing underground conscious music scene and an increasingly swelling mainstream audience. In the same progressive spirit, Mantralogy’s debut release, Ten Million Moons, from celebrated modern kirtan/conscious groove band Gaura Vani & As Kindred Spirits, is earning impressive acclaim from a wide variety of audiences, many previously unfamiliar with this music.

While Equal Vision Records is best known today for releasing music from earnest hardcore acts like Coheed and Cambria, Bane, and Chiodos, the Mantralogy wing serves to reconnect the label with its original mission to deliver edgy, Krishna-conscious music, like that of Equal Vision founder Ray Cappo’s early 90s band, Shelter. Kirtan, the main inspiration for extending into Mantralogy, is the 5,000 year-old practice of sacred Hindu chant, where repeated musical mantras enable people to step out of their habitual selves and collectively open up to a powerful, spiritual sensibility. Today, kirtan is enjoying a modern Renaissance, as a new crop of eclectic, cross-cultural chant artists create uplifting music and compelling positivity in arenas far outside the yogi niche.

Mantralogy’s first artist, Gaura Vani, blends western instrumentation, rhythms and harmonies with traditional chants and melodies, citing influences like Beck, Bjork and Peter Gabriel. He and his band, As Kindred Spirits, often perform in traditional venues like yoga studios and temples, as well as more mainstream spaces like NPR, CBS, Lollapalooza, Burning Man, and countless grassroots get-togethers on every continent. The band organized the radical, first ever Chant4Change, a sold-out kirtan festival during the presidential inauguration in January, when thousands gathered in Washington, DC to empower the new Obama administration. Ten Million Moons is presently featured on iTunes’ World Music homepage.

“Everyone deserves to feel how this music makes you feel,” explains Gaura Vani. “Music is so powerful. When it’s dealing with the soul and our inner journey, it’s even more powerful. Our goal is to take this ancient, uplifting culture and give it new roots—to thrive at a time when the world really needs it. Our vision is to build a home for spiritual music, take it from the places we expect to hear it—churches, temples, mosques—and make it the soundtrack to our lives, something that people of all walks of life can relate to.”

Sacred activists and artists Shiva Rae, Jai Uttal and Dave Stringer have dubbed Ten Million Moons “rapturous,” “powerful,” and “thrilling.”

“Everything I learned from punk rock, kirtan makes so much more meaningful,” says Equal Vision owner, Steve Reddy. “The power in this music has helped Equal Vision get to where it is today, it’s only fair to share it with others.”

Mantralogy is positioned to lead the expansion of ‘new school’ kirtan as the style grows into new popular spheres.

For more information, visit www.Mantralogy.com and www.GauraVani.com.