Yoga Tracks, Vol. 2 arrived on July 14, 2023, as a seven-track album from Girish, a kirtan artist whose real home is the live room. His reputation rests on multiday chant camps, Sacred Choir circles, workshops, and music played alongside yoga classes. A studio album from someone like that raises a fair question: how do you capture a practice built on communal response?
The title offers a clue. This is a record shaped for yoga practice, a companion for movement, breath, and stillness. It sits in his catalog as a bridge between the gathering and the solitary listener, a way to carry the feeling of the circle into a mat, a living room, or a quiet commute.
Girish's sound is built on the kirtan foundation of voice, harmonium, and tabla. The harmonium supplies the sustained, breathy drone and harmonic ground. The tabla sets a cyclical pulse that invites the body to settle into it. Over both sits his voice: clear and grounded, without ornamental showboating.
The pacing is unhurried by design. A phrase is sung, repeated, and allowed to evolve over many minutes. Don't expect a dramatic arc or a emotional climax. The repetition is the point, a way of letting the thinking mind loosen its grip. The mood is warm, steady, and devotional rather than sedative. It asks for a little presence, even when it plays softly.
Because Girish's practice centers the group, the call-and-response instinct runs through the music. Even when you listen alone, the phrases leave space, as if a room were about to answer. The album works best when you treat that space as an invitation.
I'm not going to name individual tracks here. The album's seven titles aren't something I can verify from the material available, and guessing at them would do you a disservice. The full tracklist is on the Spotify album page, and it's worth reading before you press play.
What I can offer is a way of listening for what makes any track on a record like this land:
- The entrance of the tabla. Notice the moment the rhythm locks in. In kirtan, that shift often changes the whole temperature of a piece.
- The first return of the phrase. The first repetition feels like information. By the fourth or fifth, it feels like ground. Track that change.
- The space after the call. Listen to where his voice stops. That silence is where a Sacred Choir would respond, and it's where your own voice can enter if you feel like singing.
Choose a track from the list and listen with those three markers in mind. You'll hear the album's logic quickly.
Girish works within kirtan, the Hindu devotional practice of call-and-response chanting of Sanskrit mantras. It is participatory and non-dogmatic, and it relies on harmonium, tabla, and voice. The bio names no specific teacher or lineage for him, so it's best to hear him as part of the living, pan-Indian practice of singing the names and praises of the divine, adapted for contemporary yoga studios and retreats.
What distinguishes him is emphasis. Many mantra artists sing at an audience. Girish places the collective voice at the center, and his tabla and rhythm work give the music a structure more rooted in Indian classical music than in New Age atmospherics. This album is closer to devotional practice than to ambient wallpaper, though it can quietly serve as the latter if you need it to.
This album meets three kinds of listeners well:
- Yoga practitioners and teachers who want a steady, unobtrusive devotional soundtrack for asana, restorative, or yin practice.
- Curious newcomers to kirtan who want to hear the form before committing to a workshop or retreat. Girish welcomes people with no musical or Sanskrit background, and the record reflects that openness.
- People in a moment of transition or fatigue who need repetition, rhythm, and a human voice to settle the nervous system.
It's less suited to anyone seeking high-energy music, instrumental showpieces, or a strictly secular wellness sound. Kirtan is devotional, and the repetition can feel like too much if you're not in the mood for it.
Start in the evening, with the lights low and no other task competing for attention. Use headphones for the first pass so you can hear the harmonium's drone and the tabla's texture clearly. Let the first track run its full length without skipping, even if the repetition tests you.
Then try it in practice: put the album on during a gentle yoga session or a few minutes of seated breathing. On a later listen, hum or sing the response quietly in the pauses. That's where the record stops being something you hear and becomes something you do.
If it moves you, the natural next step is live. Girish's website, girishmusic.com, lists workshops and retreats, and his appearance at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge on December 29, 2026 is a chance to hear this music the way it was meant to be heard: in a room, answering back.