At the Center for the Arts, Simrit takes the stage with Alex Antonio on keys and the dub creative collective, and for nearly ten minutes, the room becomes a vessel for something between meditation and ecstatic celebration. There is no sermon, no introduction to the teaching. There is only sound—layered, breathing, alive—and the human voice moving through it like light through water.
The piece is titled "Lion," and it arrives from the album become, a record built on the principle that transformation requires intensity, requires heat, requires the kind of focused intention that devotional music has always carried. What unfolds is a study in how modern production techniques and ancient sonic wisdom can occupy the same space without contradiction.
The Architecture of Sacred Sound
From the opening bars, the production is spacious and deliberately composed. Alex Antonio's keys lay a foundation that is neither hurried nor heavy—it breathes, it floats. This is not background music. This is intentional sonic architecture, the kind that asks something of a listener the moment they arrive. There is silence in the arrangement, which is to say there is space, and space in a devotional context is never empty. It is an invitation.
Simrit's voice enters with a clear, sustained note, and the lyrics begin to reveal themselves: "You silent holy," "around me," "found"—the words are spare, repeated, allowed to accumulate meaning through repetition rather than through linear narrative progression. This is the grammar of kirtan, the call-and-response form of chanting that originated in Indian spiritual tradition, but executed here with production sensibility that feels contemporary and rooted simultaneously.
The vocal melody is constructed for both individual beauty and collective participation. A listener alone with headphones experiences the song as a complete artistic statement; imagined in the room—and the live recording confirms this—it creates space for others to join, to echo, to become part of a larger sonic body. This dual capacity, the ability to function as both intimate art and communal practice, is the mark of serious devotional composition.
Why "Heat" as a Metaphor?
About halfway through the performance, the word "heat" begins to emerge more insistently in the vocal line. "Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat." It is chanted, almost shouted into the reverb-laden space, and the repetition becomes a kind of summoning. In spiritual practice across traditions, heat often stands for tapas—the burning away of obstacles, the friction that creates transformation. It is not comfortable. It is not meant to be.
The production supports this intensification. The dub creative's work manifests as deepening resonance, as frequencies that seem to emanate from the ground beneath the stage. The keys move into a more driving pattern. The space between each "heat" narrows and widens, narrows and widens, creating a rhythm that mirrors breath itself—the breath of someone moving through effort toward clarity.
This is not noise. This is craft. The difference between spiritual music that lands and spiritual music that slips past unheard is often a matter of production precision: How is the reverb calibrated? At what frequency does the bass sit? Where is the vocal placed in the stereo field? These are the questions a recording engineer asks, and they matter as much as the purity of intention.
The Call-and-Response Body
Throughout the piece, Simrit uses the live setting to create real dialogue with the room. There is a question posed in the vocal line, and then a kind of answer arrives—not from another vocalist, but from the accumulated response of the space itself, the reverb and delay bouncing the sound back transformed. It is a conversation between voice and place, between intention and environment. This is what live performance offers that a recording cannot fully replicate: the participation of the actual room as a fourth instrument.
The melodic material itself—the vowel sounds stretched and elongated, the limited set of words repeated and inverted—recalls the practice of mantra, where a phrase or name is repeated until it moves beyond intellectual meaning and becomes a direct experience. Words as sound. Sound as consciousness. The bridge between them is the human body, the throat, the breath.
The Album Context: Become
"Lion" is presented as part of become, Simrit's collaboration with dub creative. The title itself suggests transformation in process, not completion. Not "become the lion" but the ongoing act of becoming—the recognition that we are always in the middle of change, and the work is to meet that change with clarity and intention. The album is available on Spotify and Apple Music, each platform a different kind of listening experience; the live video carries yet another dimension, the presence of people in a room moving together through shared breath and sound.
What emerges across these contexts is not a singular definitive version of the song, but rather a recognition that sacred music exists in relationship to its container—the space, the listener's state, the time of day, the season. The song is not fixed. The song is alive.
Where to Go From Here
A listener moved by "Lion" might explore the full become album to understand how this moment fits within a larger arc. The collaboration between Simrit and dub creative suggests both artists' investment in production as spiritual practice, not decoration. Seek out other recordings of call-and-response devotional forms—both traditional and contemporary—to hear how this lineage extends across cultures and centuries. And if possible, experience live devotional music in person. The video captures something real, but the room itself is where the full resonance becomes possible.
