Bhakti · Sacred Chants of India
American composer and producer living in Britain, whose Sacred Chants series set Sanskrit mantra in arrangements that keep the chant at the centre.
Craig Pruess was born in 1950 in the United States and has lived in Britain since 1973. His working life has ranged remarkably wide: record production for international artists, arrangements for Massive Attack and Def Leppard, and film soundtrack work among them.
Running alongside all of that is the devotional strand he is best known for here. The Sacred Chants recordings set Sanskrit mantra — to Shiva, to Devi, to Krishna — in arrangements built to carry the chant rather than decorate it, and they have become a fixture in yoga rooms and meditation halls far beyond India.
He works closely with the singer Ananda Vidyarthi on much of this material.
Talks, day programmes and retreats currently listed in the Paths Are Many calendar.
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Short introductions and longer conversations, to hear this artist in their own words.
The second half of the same conversation, in which Pruess follows his work outwards into his humanitarian anthem with The Ganda Boys and his ideas about sound, geometry and what he calls light language.
Craig Pruess talks at length about where his music comes from, how meditation and mantra shape the writing, and what it means to make sound that is meant to be devotional rather than decorative.
The path of loving devotion: surrender, chanting and remembrance as ways to dissolve the sense of separation from the divine.
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