Aradhna

It is impossible to listen to Aradhna without a sense that something much deeper is brooding under the music. Spirituality is such an easy term to throw around when speaking about a thing you can't explain but nonetheless feel. It's a term that breeds ambiguity and at times, misunderstanding. Nonetheless it is a word that is necessary in describing the formation and subsequent work of Aradhna. After all, the name of the band is the spiritually charged Hindi term that means "adoration." Popular music is often made to settle into the nooks and crannies of our daily humdrum, like an elixir against the pain of human existence. We drink it in and feel a bit better but we don't expect it to change anything beyond our emotional state. Aradhna is a band with higher aspirations, making music that is centered around spiritual enlightenment and transformation while keeping ethnic integrity intact.
Aradhna's front man Chris Hale, an American, spent his childhood and adolescence in South Asia, where he gained fluency in Nepali and Hindi. It was in these formative years that Chris began to study the sitar and develop a love for bhajans, the classical devotional genre of India. In 1999, Pete Hicks, who also has roots in India, joined Chris and Aradhna was formed with the recording of their first album, Deep Jale.
Now Aradhna is releasing their most ambitious and far-reaching project yet, their sixth album Namaste Saté, along with a companion DVD Sau Guna, a collection of music videos filmed in Varanasi, India. The intimate and immense sound of Namaste Sate not only builds upon the best of their preceding albums but deepens the possibilities of cultural and spiritual contextualization in the most winsome and genuine of ways.