Mantra Americana II: OM TIMES EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE
Mantra Americana II
OM Times brings you the new ‘Country & Eastern’ album Mantra Americana II for a first-listen before the August 25 release date.
Check it out here.
Bhakti yogis and artists-producers Madi Das and Dave Stringer return with the follow-up to their Grammy-nominated projects, the debut Mantra Americana and charity album Bhakti Without Borders. “Mantra Americana II is my love letter to modern chant music.” says lead singer and producer Madi Das, who calls Melbourne, Australia, home. “This time, Dave and I wanted to make something truly ambitious and fun that catapults mantra music into an exciting new direction. It’s a feast for the ears – you will not have heard an album like this before but will quickly realize it’s exactly what you’ve been waiting for.”
The primary musical feature of Kirtan is the use of call and response, which also deeply informs Bluegrass, Gospel, and Jazz. Mantra Americana II combines modal melodies derived from Indian ragas with the chord structures and ecstatic harmonies of American Gospel and Bluegrass, swinging Bhangra tabla grooves, and a twang of Appalachia. The tracks have lush arrangements that take you from the Ganges to the Mississippi – Sanskrit with Soul, a little Nashville with Namasté.
Mantra Americana: An Ambitious Project!
Mantra Americana II broadens its players to include Americana music legends Greg Leisz, Dean Parks, and Mitchel Foreman on dobro, mandolin, pedal steel, accordion, piano, and Hammond organ. Patrick Richey, who studied in India but was raised in Tennessee, is featured on tabla. The outstanding backing vocal quartet features Tulsi Bloom (who was also on Bhakti Without Borders and Mantra Americana), Allie Stringer, Justin Michael Williams, and Stringer with performances that recall the Laurel Canyon sound of the ‘70s, singing mantras in Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi.
Los Angeles’s Dave Stringer, an internationally acclaimed kirtan singer who is featured in the award-winning Mantra: Sounds Into Silence documentary, describes single ‘Ramani Ramana,’ “The deeper, spiritual meaning behind this song is about Radha and Ramana as indivisible and always together, electromagnetic forces in a universe of love. Radha takes the name, Ramani, representing how polarities can flip, feminine assuming the guise of masculinity, all pairs of opposites and energies becoming the other in a cosmic dance of endless transformation. Vrindavan, known as the childhood home of the god Krishna, represents innocence and play as our natural state of consciousness. It’s arguably the album’s most fun and audacious track, an Indian wedding band meeting a New Orleans front line. James Harrah’s electric guitar offers up some gritty distortion and drives as tabla and mridangam dance in playful rhythmic interplay. A horn section of Corbin Jones on tenor sax and Aaron Janik on trumpet keeps the Mantra Americana party lively.”
