Grammy-nominated vocalist Radhika Vekaria and Grammy-winning violinist Nathalie Bonin talk about their album, Sacred Echoes, which blends Vedic chants with orchestral imagination
Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Radhika Vekaria and award-winning composer-violinist Nathalie Bonin have created something rare with Sacred Echoes, a seven-track album that feels like a meeting of centuries in a single breath. The album was recorded partly at Vienna’s legendary Synchron Stage, where the soundtracks of Mission Impossible and Ad Astra came into life, and partly at the UK’s School Farm Studios.
Vekaria, a British artist of East African-Indian heritage, is no stranger to transforming the ancient into the vividly contemporary. Her work reimagines Sanskrit chants as living soundscapes: immersive, hypnotic, and restorative. To hear her voice is to feel a door opening, quietly, into a space where sound is no mere performance but some sort of a prayer.
Bonin, meanwhile, is the virtuoso who can make a violin sing like silk or burn like fire. Named SOCAN’s Screen Composer of the Year in 2023, she has scored for Bridgerton, New Amsterdam, and productions for Canadian entertainment company Cirque du Soleil. She has shared the stage with icons like Stevie Wonder and Wynton Marsalis. The sensibilities of the California-based artists fold into one another like dusk into dawn: if Vekaria has spiritual gravitas, Bonin is endowed with orchestral imagination.
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Both artists arrive at this collaboration from lives steeped in multiplicity. Vekaria has performed everywhere from SXSW to the Grammy Museum to Harvard University, carrying Vedic philosophy and the principle of consciousness into contemporary cultural spaces. Bonin, featured on the Grammy-winning project Women Warriors: The Voices of Change, has long worked across genres, fluidly moving between classical, jazz, and scores for movies.
Claiming space at the largest scoring stage
Each of the seven tracks in Sacred Echoes corresponds to one of the seven realms of existence in Vedic philosophy. Each is a kind of passage, carrying listeners toward an expansive inner landscape. “When we first began the album, the idea of the seven realms wasn’t part of the plan. They revealed themselves as the music unfolded. I tend to treat music as an emotional landscape. Vedic philosophy often speaks in symbolic language; it points you toward the realm it’s addressing,” Vekaria explains.
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Bonin adds: “It’s less about what we decide and more about what the music requires. So while the framework of the seven realms gave us direction, the music itself did the translating. In the end, the album isn’t about explaining philosophy; it’s about allowing people to feel those very human states for themselves. Recording at Synchron became a defining moment for the duo. “It’s a stage known for massive Hollywood scores — huge orchestras, global productions — so to bring in an album rooted in Sanskrit mantra and inner reflection felt both unexpected and deeply right,” Vekaria says.
The resonance of the strings with the Sanskrit syllables transformed the hall into a conduit for devotional energy, amplifying the mantras’ vibrational power. “It gave the mantras a new dimension, almost as if the room itself was expanding to hold them. We weren’t trying to imitate what that room had already held; we were bringing something completely different into it.”
For the two artists, it wasn’t about proving anything, but about walking into a space like that and saying: this music, too, deserves to exist on this scale. Vekaria says: “I personally had dreamt of fusing devotional music with orchestra so it was quite surreal in one way. However the blend of mantra, orchestration, and cinematic sound found a natural home in that hall”.
A journey through seven realms
The album’s seven tracks — Gurudeva, Lotus Dream, In the Dark, Devotion, and others —each represent a distinct world, a chapter in an emotional pilgrimage. “Each track asked for what it needed to be, and when we put them side by side, it became clear that they were forming a progression, almost like a pilgrimage,” Vekaria recounts.
Gurudeva, she underlines, emerged naturally as the invocation, setting intention; Lotus Dream evokes innocence and childlike wonder; In the Dark plunges into tension and uncertainty; and Devotion opens into release and joy. Looking back, Bonin notes, it feels mapped, but at the time it was a discovery: “Between the two of us, we were exploring very natural emotions as artists — states that we experience so often in our field and in life. That’s probably why the sequencing feels so organic. It wasn’t designed in advance; it was lived and then revealed through the music.”
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Vekaria says she grew up playing in an orchestra at school and has always had an affection for cinematic and classical music. In the track, The Cradle, as the orchestral language met the Sanskrit and its melody, she felt like it was something she had been waiting to express for a long time. “It was as if all those parts of me — my cultural roots, my love of mantra, and my early connection to orchestral sound — finally converged. I could exhale a dream I had carried for years. It was a moment of true union, where the best of seemingly opposing worlds and genres found their balance. For me, it’s a confirmation of a sweet spot in convergence; we just need to find the right harmony.”
Home, belonging, and the echo of sound
Asked about the album’s guiding principle — returning listeners “home” — both artists stress on an interior, rather than geographic, understanding of home. “Entertainment, in its essence, is distraction… When I’m working with mantra, silence, or even the resonance of a single note, there’s a moment where everything aligns and I feel completely present. That, to me, is home,” Vekaria says. She adds that this internal sense of alignment allows the music to transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries.
The album honours Krishna and Radha, Devi and Mahadev, but also feels universal. The universality of Sanskrit mantras contributes to this cross-cultural appeal. “Even if you don’t understand Sanskrit, the sound itself carries an energy the body and spirit recognise. These mantras have been repeated for centuries, so there’s a weight and resonance in them that goes beyond translation. Their echoes are in the ether,” Vekaria explains.
“Sanskrit itself is derived from nature — its sounds mirror the elements, the breath, the rhythms of life. Because we are all part of nature, the experience becomes unifying, not only with ourselves but with one another. I’ve seen it again and again — whether in Seville, London, or Los Angeles, audiences close their eyes and connect, even if it’s the first time they’ve heard a mantra. Ultimately, these various forms of the Divine are all paths to an eternal truth that resides within each one of us. So with this music, we’re really appealing to the higher part of ourselves,” she adds.
In an era dominated by AI-generated music, the album stakes a claim for human, lived creativity. “This project was never about creating something that could be optimised by algorithms; it was about touching something timeless,” Vekaria says. The orchestral collaboration with the Synchron Orchestra, along with percussionist Manjeet Singh Rasiya and flautist Shashank Acharya, underscores the human, intergenerational dimension of the project.
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Bonin says this rootedness in tradition coexists with innovation. “Sacred Echoes is the culmination of real life, lived experiences, and generations of culture. That’s not something an algorithm can replicate.” The album shows that sound, devotion, and cultural memory remain irreducibly human, even as technology encroaches all aspects of our lives.
Honouring the truth sound holds
The album’s title itself reflects this continuity. “When I listen back, I don’t just hear my own voice and Nathalie’s strings. I hear the lineages that shaped us… the echo is not just ours. It’s the resonance of ancestors, mentors, and the audiences who receive and reflect the energy back,” Vekaria says. Every note exists simultaneously as creation and reflection, an auditory thread connecting past, present, and future.
If this project is an ‘invitation to remember,’ what is the one thing they hope people remember after they have listened to all these tracks? “That we are part of an echo that has been and will continue to be. This music is just one moment in a much longer line of sound, devotion, and human experience. Our hope is that listeners come away asking themselves: how will I carry my part forward in that long echo? And in that, if even one listener walks away with a deeper sense of belonging — to themselves, to others, to the divine — then the music fulfils its purpose,” they say in unison.
Vekaria says she is continuing to expand her music in live settings: concerts and immersive shows where sound is experienced not just as performance but as transformation. “Alongside the Sound of Light Experience, I hold workshops and retreats where people can explore mantras not just as a ritual but as a life practice. Music is not just something to listen to — it’s something to live. And in living it, I try to honor the truth that sound itself holds.”
