The cello arrives first — a low, bowed figure that could open a film noir as easily as a devotional. Then the kora, the West African harp, spilling notes like water over the top of it. And then the voice: deep in the pocket, unhurried, singing syllables most of the room doesn't understand and none of the room can let go of. Within two minutes a Simrit concert has already broken the contract most live music signs — that you will watch a performance. This is not that. This is a weather system, and you are in it.
A Voice with a Passport
The story behind that voice reads like it was invented by a novelist with no fear of coincidence. Simrit was born in Athens, of Cretan origin, and adopted as an infant — "I was adopted when I was a little over a year old," she told SF Yoga Magazine in 2016 — by a Greek family who settled in South Carolina. "We were brought to the American South, but my parents were Greek and raised us in a strong Greek culture at home," she recalled in a Shutter 16 interview the same year. The house held two worlds at once: the American South outside the door, and inside, the liturgical drone of the Greek Orthodox church choir she grew up singing in — a tradition of melisma and lament that runs straight back through her great-grandmother, Tula Demetriou, a singer and actress who lent her voice to Greece's resistance songs.
Learning her own origin story, she has said, is part of what gives the music its floor. "That pulled me deep into myself," she told Shutter 16, "and that has a lot to do with the depth of my music." Layer onto that lineage years of West African drumming, classical piano, and long formal study of Naad Yoga — the yogic science of sound — and you get a musician for whom "world music" is not a bin at the record store. It's an autobiography.
The Band Is the Instrument
Live and on record, Simrit writes for an ensemble that no one else in devotional music is fielding. "We tour with the kora, the cello and the bass and a drum kit," she has said of the group's core architecture — in recent years that has meant players like cellist Shannon Hayden and kora master Salif Bamakora, with Jared May on bass and Moog and Devon Ashley on drums. The arrangements start whole in her head. "Most of the time I hear the whole orchestrated composition in my head, so I flesh out the details one step at a time on a recorder," she explained to Asheville Grit in 2017. What she's chasing in those compositions is repetition with intent — mantra as groove. "I really love repeating chants over and over," she told SF Yoga Magazine. "That's my jam."
The records built this way have quietly stacked up a chart history most independent artists would frame: From the Ancient Storm (2015) went to #1 on the iTunes world chart and #3 on Billboard's New Age chart; Live, Spring 2017 hit #1 on the iTunes world charts in the US, the UK, and Australia at once; When We Return (2019) topped the iTunes world chart again. Of that last album she promised, in the release announcement, that "the listener will be taken on an adventure... a cosmic journey. The cool thing about it is that it's psychedelic. We use sound and hypnotic language as ancient but fresh and limitless cosmic transmissions." It is the rare press-release sentence that undersells the record.
What Happens in the Room
Simrit herself is careful not to make claims for the experience. "I only know what my own experience is," she told Asheville Grit, "but from what people tell us, our live performance is a big experience." Audiences are less restrained. Rooms that arrive as strangers tend to leave as something else — the vocabulary people reach for afterward runs to words like healing and transmission, the kind of language that sounds inflated until the night you find yourself using it.
Six Days Inside the Sound
Which brings us to the news. In April 2027, Simrit is trading the two-hour concert for the long form: the SIMRIT Bali Sound of the Soul Retreat, six days in Ubud, Indonesia — April 13 through 19 — built around daily immersion in the practice that underlies the music: sound, chant, and the disciplined stillness of Naad Yoga, with the woman who has spent a lifetime inside it. For anyone who has left one of her concerts wanting to stay inside that weather system a while longer, this is the extended forecast.
Details and registration are at the Sound of the Soul Retreat page, and her upcoming dates live on her artist profile.
