Lokah Samastah is a devotional mantra performed live in a Buenos Aires studio by Prashanti Paz with guitarist and vocalist Diego Marchionatti and violinist Pablo Lammer, recorded in December 2022 with no rehearsal beforehand. The session was built on a simple premise: three musicians who had not shared a stage or studio in three years sit down, start playing, and let the music decide what happens next. What comes out is less a polished performance than a document of connection, the kind of trust that lets a sacred phrase be sung, answered and carried by instruments without a map. For anyone curious about how mantra and bhajan work when they leave the page and enter a room, this recording is a clear and unusually intimate example.
Most recorded music arrives after a long chain of preparation: arrangements sketched, parts learned, takes repeated until the rough edges are sanded away. This session runs in the opposite direction. According to the notes accompanying the video, Paz, Marchionatti and Lammer had not played together for three years, and they came to the session without rehearsing a single note. The studio was Bamboo Studio in Buenos Aires, and the sound and video were handled by Alejo Nobili, who is credited on the recording as both video and sound engineer.
That choice matters. A rehearsed arrangement tends to protect the musicians from one another: each person knows where to land, and the listener hears the result of that planning. An unrehearsed session asks the players to listen harder. Every phrase has to be heard before it can be answered. In devotional music, that attentiveness is often the point. The repetition of a short sacred line is meant to quiet the mind of the one singing it, and when several people are repeating it together, the quality of their listening becomes part of the sound itself.
The description frames the session in exactly these terms. It speaks of spontaneity, and of a connection "very much alive despite time or distance." Those words are the producers' own, and they describe what a listener can hear: musicians who know each other's habits well enough to find the shared pulse quickly, without needing to agree on it in advance.
The title is drawn from a traditional Sanskrit phrase that is widely known in yoga and devotional circles: lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu, usually rendered as "may all beings in all worlds be happy." The phrase is a prayer of widening compassion. It does not ask for happiness for the singer, or for a particular community. It reaches outward to every living being, which is a large intention to hold while singing a few words over and over.
That outward movement is what gives the mantra its shape in performance. A single line can be sung slowly, with space around each word, or it can build in intensity as voices join. A song built on a short phrase works differently from a verse-and-chorus song: the words are not there to tell a story but to be inhabited, and the listener is invited to stay with the same few syllables long enough for their meaning to change. The session is recorded in that spirit, with the melody returning and the instruments moving around the words rather than away from them.
The tags attached to the video and its online presence place the performance within a wider lineage of devotional and contemplative music: bhajan, mantra, Buddhist song and a clear interest in the idea of moving from stress toward happiness. The Spanish hashtag "Delestresalafelicidad," which translates roughly as "from stress to happiness," signals how the music is being offered to listeners: not as a lecture but as something to breathe with. The Matthieu Ricard tag points to another reference point in contemplative culture, though the video itself does not make that connection in its description.
A bhajan is a devotional song, usually sung in a group, and its traditional strength is that it can be learned by ear. Melodies are repeated, lines are passed between voices, and the structure is loose enough to open up when more people join. That looseness is why bhajans have long been sung in temples, homes and gatherings where the singers may never have sung together before. The form does not depend on perfect coordination. It depends on shared intention and a willingness to follow.
Read this way, the decision to record without rehearsal is less a gamble than a return to the roots of the form. Three players who know a devotional melody can meet it in the moment, and the arrangement comes from the listening rather than from a score. The violin can sustain a line where the voice breathes. The guitar can hold a harmonic floor while the melody circles. None of this has to be planned to work; it has to be heard.
For a listener, that quality is easiest to notice in the moments where the players seem to find each other. In a rehearsed recording those moments are placed. In a spontaneous one, they happen, and they feel different: slightly less certain, more alive, carrying a faint sense that the music is being discovered as it goes. That is the atmosphere the session's own description points toward.
The phrase in the description that stays with a reader is the one about connection that is "very much alive despite time or distance." Three years is a long gap for musicians who once worked together regularly, and the notes make clear that the reunion was not routine. What the session demonstrates is that some musical relationships survive absence intact. The players do not need to rebuild trust from zero; they can pick up where a shared language left off.
There is something quietly moving in that. Devotional music is often described as a practice of presence, and presence is difficult to fake in a recording studio. A performance that asks musicians to listen rather than to impress can reveal a great deal about the bond between them. In this case, the bond is the subject as much as the mantra.
The most useful way to come to Lokah Samastah is to listen without expecting a conventional song. Let the repetition do its work. Notice where the violin enters and how the guitar and vocal respond to it. If the phrase is familiar, you may find yourself singing along silently; if it is new, let the words wash over you before trying to hold their meaning.
Those who want to explore the practice further can apply the same approach at home. Choose a short, meaningful phrase. Repeat it slowly. Allow the melody, if there is one, to change with your breath rather than forcing it into a fixed shape. Many people find that a mantra sung without rehearsal, without a fixed outcome, teaches the same lesson as this session: that the most affecting music often arrives when the performers stop trying to control it.
The track is available on Spotify under its title, and the artist's own website and social channels, including the Instagram and Facebook pages listed in the video's description, are the places to follow Paz's ongoing work. Marchionatti's own Instagram is also credited in the notes.
Start with the recording itself, then return to the meaning of the phrase. Listen once for the musicians, once for the mantra, and once for the silence between them. If you want to deepen the context, explore traditional bhajan and mantra recordings alongside this session, and notice how spontaneity changes the way a sacred phrase is heard. A short reunion captured in a Buenos Aires studio, with no rehearsal and no safety net, turns out to say a good deal about what devotional music is for: staying present with others long enough for something true to be shared.
