Sri Kala is a music artist, producer, lyricist, and creative freedom guide whose work moves between the dance floor, the meditation hall, and the retreat circle. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, a first-generation Caribbean American with roots in Nigeria and Cameroon. He describes growing up amid the many races and cultures of the city, and says that this inheritance has deeply shaped both his journey and his mission.
That layered background is not a footnote to his work. It is close to its organizing principle. An artist who grows up among many traditions, and who carries several ancestral threads of his own, tends to hear connections where others hear borders. In Sri Kala's case, that instinct would eventually lead him to place hip hop beside Sanskrit chant, and West African spirituality beside the devotional philosophies of India.
As a young man, Sri Kala found his community not in traditional school but in skateboarding. The pull was strong enough that it became more than a pastime. He went on to create the All City Skate Jam, an event that later evolved into the internationally celebrated Go Skate Day.
It is an early example of a pattern that runs through his life: finding a world of belonging outside conventional structures, and then building something so that others can find it too. The impulse to gather people around a shared practice would resurface years later in a very different form.
The path from skate culture to sacred sound began with questions. A period of searching, partly prompted by an LSD experience, set him on a hunt for deeper meaning. In 2002 he began exploring meditation, Reiki, Qigong, lucid dreaming, and astral travel, a wide-ranging inquiry into consciousness and energy.
That exploration led him to the Hare Krishna movement, where he spent six years as a monk. There he studied ancient Sanskrit prayers and the healing properties of sound vibration. For a musician, this was more than a spiritual education. It was a long immersion in the idea that sound is not merely entertainment but a force that can shape inner states, a premise that now underlies nearly everything he makes.
Sri Kala is known for fusing worlds that are rarely placed in the same room. His music blends hip hop, dub reggae, rock, R&B, and Afrobeat, and his projects have also drawn on dubstep and kirtan, the call-and-response devotional chanting of the Bhakti tradition. He works as an MC, DJ, producer, and percussionist, and each role feeds the others.
In performance, he uses Ableton Live to present original music, improvising with live Indian percussion and ambient vocals. The result is a set that keeps one foot in electronic production and the other in older, more human traditions of rhythm and voice. The technology provides architecture; the improvisation and the voice provide breath.
His reconnection with African heritage has added another dimension. He has found similarities between the spiritual traditions of the Yoruba people and the Bhakti and Vedic philosophies he studied as a monk. That observation sits at the center of his creative outlook: that devotion, rhythm, and ancestral memory speak across geography, and that an artist can honor several lineages at once without flattening any of them.
His album Unravel is the clearest statement of his current direction. It features vocal tones and sounds that go beyond traditional song structures, favoring texture and presence over verse-chorus convention. Sri Kala describes it as the start of a new chapter built on vulnerability, organic sound, and the power of the voice.
The framing matters. For an artist with a background in MCing and production, where precision and polish are valued, a record centered on vulnerability and the unadorned voice represents a deliberate loosening of control. The title itself suggests the process: letting something tightly wound come undone.
Alongside his recorded and live music, Sri Kala works as a guide. He leads people, one-on-one and in groups, in creative expression and in breaking free from limitation. This is a natural extension of his own story, which has been one of repeatedly stepping outside inherited frameworks to find a more authentic way of living and making.
He and his wife, Jesse, have led groups to India to explore Bhakti, bringing participants into direct contact with the tradition that transformed his own life. He is also a co-founder of Actualize Music, which leads retreats where participants turn their life stories into music, a practice that treats songwriting less as a performance skill than as a tool for understanding and transformation.
Today, Sri Kala's work sits at the intersection of art and facilitation. Unravel signals a more exposed, voice-centered approach to making music, while the retreats and one-on-one guidance carry that same ethos into the lives of others. His Spotify audience, a little over nine thousand followers, is modest in scale, but it reflects the kind of artist he is: one whose impact is measured less in streaming numbers than in the depth of engagement with those who find him through kirtan communities, retreat spaces, and live shows.
Sri Kala matters because he occupies a space that few artists do. Kirtan has grown in the West largely through yoga studios and spiritual communities, often with a sound and aesthetic rooted in a narrow band of cultural reference. He arrives instead as a Black Brooklyn-raised hip hop artist and DJ with real monastic training, and he brings the vocabulary of reggae, dub, Afrobeat, and electronic music into the practice. That widens the doorway for listeners who might never have seen themselves reflected in devotional music.
He also speaks to a broader hunger for music that heals as well as entertains. By linking Yoruba and Vedic traditions, he offers a quiet argument that spiritual wisdom is not the property of any one culture, and that returning to ancestral roots and exploring distant traditions can be part of the same journey.
His reach spans several audiences: skaters and hip hop heads who recognize the street-level origins, seekers and yogis drawn to kirtan and Bhakti, and creatives looking for permission to express themselves more freely. What unites them is the idea at the heart of his work. Sound, used with intention, can help a person unravel what binds them and step into something more open.