Ma Song (Atom Smith Remix) is a single, one track released on May 23, 2025. It is not a full album, so this guide treats it as a focused listen rather than a record to be walked through front to back. It arrives in a catalog that stretches across decades. Wah! describes herself as the first female to bring kirtan, the call-and-response chanting of India, to the West in the 1990s, and she has played bass guitar with her joyful rock band at yoga festivals and centers since 1997. Her newest full album, It's Friday Night, marks 30 years in the music industry.
The remix belongs to a thread that runs through her work: a willingness to treat mantra as material that can be reinterpreted. Her catalog includes dance and instrumental mixes, the reggae-influenced Chill Yoga Music 2, and the 2018 Yellow Lakshmi remixes. Here the reinterpreter is Atom Smith, the one named collaborator on this release.
Wah!'s foundation is Sanskrit mantra sung over harmonium, her own voice carrying the melody and the call-and-response shape of kirtan. In her online kirtan concerts she adds Ableton Live, so her sound is already comfortable with electronic layering. A remix pushes that further. Expect the devotional core to be reframed by a producer's hand rather than presented as unamplified room singing.
I can't tell you the remix's exact tempo, structure or instrumentation, because those details aren't in the material I have. What the wider catalog suggests is a warm, produced sound closer to a modern studio recording than to traditional kirtan. Her recent work leans mid-tempo, and listeners who want high-BPM electronic music may find her pacing measured. Go in expecting repetition and sincerity, which is how the form works.
There is one: Ma Song (Atom Smith Remix). What makes it land is the premise. A kirtan artist who has long blended chant with rock, dub and dance hands her material to another producer and lets the mantra be heard from a new angle. That fits how she works. Her catalog treats the mantra as living material rather than fixed liturgy.
Listen for how the call-and-response impulse survives the remix. In kirtan, repetition is the engine: a phrase returns until it stops being a phrase and becomes a state. A remix can sharpen that effect through rhythm and texture, or loosen it into something more atmospheric. Noticing which way Atom Smith leans is the pleasure of the track.
Wah!'s work belongs to bhakti, the devotional path in which sung names of the divine carry the practice, and her form is kirtan. Her bio names no specific teacher or line of succession, and her claim to have brought kirtan to the West is her own account. Her catalog shows a devotional orientation, with titles such as Prabhuji and DEVOTION and the 2024 single Prano Devi Saraswati.
A remix sits at the edge of that tradition. Her Healing Concert and sound-healing practice already extend kirtan into the vocabulary of the wellness world, and some purists of Indian kirtan may read that as a departure. A club-adjacent or ambient remix extends the question. Whether you hear it as devotional music in new clothes or as a bridge for people who would never sit in a kirtan circle is part of what the track invites you to decide.
This single suits listeners already curious about mantra who want it in a more contemporary, produced setting: yoga students who like a beat under their practice, people who know Wah! through her rock-band energy, and anyone who enjoys hearing a familiar devotional voice reworked. It fits a life moment where you want something that carries a spiritual thread without the formality of a full chant session.
It is less suited to listeners who want purely traditional, unaccompanied kirtan, and it won't satisfy skeptics of wellness language looking for ironic distance. Newcomers wanting the core sound first should start with Queen of Mantra, her 2019 eight-track album of Sanskrit mantra, and come to the remix afterward as a variation.
Give it a single uninterrupted play with headphones, so the layers a remix adds are easy to hear. Choose a time when you can be still: an evening wind-down, or the stretch before or after a yoga practice. Because the form depends on repetition, resist skipping ahead. Let the first minutes settle you, then notice what changes.
Then play it a second time and sing along quietly, even just on the returning phrases. Kirtan is meant to be participated in, and a remix doesn't change that. If the track makes you curious about the source, follow it with Queen of Mantra (Instrumentals), where the harmonium-led arrangements show the structure beneath the chants.
