On a bright September day in Bourges, an 8 year old girl in a red dress walked into a guitar class, and her life changed forever.
Mathilde clutched her child-sized guitar, a birthday gift unlike any other. She was confident: in fact, she fully expected the process of learning to play the guitar to be a walk in the park. After her first class, she went back home having learned two big lessons: first, that it wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. The second lesson has stayed with her to the present day: her teacher emphasized the fact that music was a game, and that play was an essential component of the process.
Classical Guitar
She studied with her first teacher for six years, and quickly progressed as a classical guitar player. By the time she was 18, Mathilde was an accomplished musical artist: she moved to Paris to study music in a Conservatory. and she started working as a guitar teacher soon after. Four years later, she joined the Superior Conservatory; she ate, lived, and breathed music.
She spent at least three hours a day practicing scales, and she still held onto her first lesson: that of deriving joy from her music. But there was also pressure and competition: after all, she was in one of the world’s biggest centers for learning classical music. Her search for a way to complete her musical and personal identity led her, in the next few years, to the missing piece.
The India Connection
Mathilde traveled to India for the first time in 2015, and her life changed forever, for the second time.
She was already proficient in reiki and yoga, but her exposure to yoga had previously focused only on the physical aspect of the ancient art. She did not know about Nada Yoga, the aural dimension of yoga, and she had not experienced kirtans, the devotional chants and spiritual narratives.
Having dreamed of visiting India for years, she landed in Delhi in March 2015. On a train to Agra, she stopped at Vrindavan and Mathura, two sites famous for their association with Lord Krishna. After listening to her first Hare Krishna kirtan and, a few days later, immersing herself in the bhajans (devotional songs) sung in Varanasi, she experienced a powerful epiphany. She had found that which would complete her musical and spiritual journey.
Music Yoga had entered Mathilde’s life.
A few years later, by 2019, she had bought a harmonium, and had started to immerse herself in the vast Indian tradition of music. After a few years, she started composing, as well, recording audio doodles on her phone. It wasn’t till a trip to Mysore (in Southern India) in 2022 till she first showed another human being her recordings. They loved it, and she realized that this could be huge, bigger than she had ever imagined. That was the genesis of Simple Things, her first album.
Simple Things
Simple Things has seven songs, and is notable for its fusion of ancient sacred Sanskrit chants and classical Western guitar, Mathilde’s musical language of choice for two decades. The story of its creation is almost as fascinating as the album itself.
In July and August 2022, Mathilde was in Mysore again, deepening her understanding of yoga. In her second home, her creative instincts kicked in, and she recorded a large number of musical ideas on her phone. By that time, she had already performed a few musical pieces in yoga retreats in France, and the song ideas she had inflamed her imagination.
In October 2022, Mathilde asked a producer friend, ZêThó, of hers in Paris if he could help her record a few songs; at this point, a full album was the farthest thing from her mind. She wasn’t sure how long it would take: surely there would be a long pre-production phase, where they refined the songs? And possibly multiple rounds of recording, and song tests, and mixing and mastering?
ZêThó listened to the songs, turned to her, and said: We will make an album.
The initial recording took exactly five days.
Five days with little to no sleep. Five days of writing and making small edits to melodies to get everything just right. Five days of hectic recording: Mathilde did all the tracks herself: four guitar tracks for every song, and multiple vocal takes.
When she thinks back to those 120 hours, she’s still not sure how she performed a miracle. But she’s always been that way: working without stopping when captivated by something in the music or yoga world. And this project lived in both worlds at once.
In December 2022, Mathilde and ZêThó booked three days in a music studio in Paris for the final recording. Just like in October, three days was absurdly little to record seven songs: she can recall feeling like her brain was about to explode. She even performed the shirshasana (a yoga exercise which involves sustaining a headstand) to warm up during the recording phase. Her mastery of the physical dimension of yoga helped her power through the three hectic days of studio time.
The next day, she left Paris for Mysore. When she arrived, she was asked if she wanted to perform live, at a kirtan. The Mathilde from four months previous might have been nervous. But the Mathilde who had just recorded her first album in less than a week didn’t bat an eyelid. In parallel, she listened to rough mixes of the tracks each day in Mysore after her early morning yoga sessions. As she soaked her idli in her steaming bowl of sambar, her fingers worked busily to send feedback to ZêThó, 8000 kilometers away.
And so it was that, through her devotion to her art and her collaborations with people who saw her vision, Mathilde created Simple Things and brought it into the world in December. Her first yoga music child is a well produced album of ancient mantras set to music, and every aspect of it is lovingly crafted. For example, the visual identity and cover, which leans heavily on the color pink, a hue that is very close to Mathilde’s soul: the color of love, the color of energy, her color. It is available on every platform that hosts music, and it is her wish that she brings the blessings of yoga music to as many people as possible.
Composition
Mathilde’s Indian classical music (specifically, Nada Yoga) teacher is based in Nice. During her work with him, she learned many of the mantras featured on Simple Things, and her yoga and spiritual practice opened the door to the others. As she chanted them, she found something wonderful happening: her two decades of experience with Western classical music created a fusion between occidental scales and Eastern raga melodic modes. Her soul is at home in both France and India, and her music reflects these two important parts of her being.
Tera Geet Kaur
For many years in the late 2010s, Mathilde concentrated on the physical aspects of yoga, and spent less time on her musical side. All that changed when, after a discussion with some yogis at a kirtan in France, she decided to write to a kundalini website and ask for her spiritual name. When she received the name of Tera Geet Kaur, the Princess who connected to the Divine through the power of song, she had received a powerful sign, a sign that recognized her deep connection to music, even though she had given them no details about her two decade background in the arts. The sign stayed with her as she made music an integral part of her life once again, and her Indian name is now Tera Geet Kaur.
Live Performances
Tera Geet has performed live to audiences across India and France, using her gift of Music Yoga to bless thousands of people.
When she performs the songs from Simple Things live, she has two different – and very positive – experiences, depending on whether she is performing in France or in India. Her European audiences always have people who have never experienced kirtans before, and are mostly composed of yoga students, who soak in the energy, and tell her afterwards that they felt the meditative power of the songs and mantras. When she performed for the first time in India (at Santosha Café in Mysore, she was a little nervous; the audience held dozens of people who had attended dozens of kirtans. As they all chanted with her, her tension eased, and when they told her afterwards that they loved it, and that she had created a new art form, she was ecstatic.
When she plays live, she is often accompanied by percussion instruments like the tabla, and hence simplifies some chords to fit around the percussive rhythm. She has an idea of the setlist she would like to follow, but song lengths and song orders are both fluid, and are shaped by the energy of the audience on any given night.
Her Voice
During our conversations with Mathilde, one point suddenly struck us: all her training had been in classical guitar; she never mentioned voice training. However, as Tera Geet, her powerful voice formed an indispensable part of each song. When we asked her about this, she told us how, as a child and young teen, she had been very shy; she does not remember ever singing in front of other people. In fact, when friends of hers from back in the day look at video of her performances today, they do a double take.
The fascinating part was that the skill to sing was always within Mathilde. The practice of Yoga and Nada Yoga gave her the power to allow her to realize her innate skill, and to express herself in a totally different way, to live her truth. Her voice was strengthened by pranayama, the breathing techniques she learned as part of her yoga practice. By the time she started studying Nada Yoga vocals in 2019, her voice was already very strong, and she could identify and reproduce any note that she heard.
Future Plans
In the future, Tera Geet would like to give more importance to the musical part of her spiritual journey, and create more and more – songs, performances, new interpretations. She is especially keen to perform with other musicians, both live and in studio settings, so that her learning journey never stops.
She is very grateful to everyone who has supported her during her life as an artist and yogini. In no particular order, she would like to thank Acharya Vinay Kumar, her yoga guru in Mysore, who mentors her in Prana Vashya yoga, Sri Hanuman, her Nada Yoga teacher in Nice, and ZêThó, her production partner (and owner of the Do2 Manos label), who went above and beyond: not only did he help her produce, but also encouraged her to take the first big step of recording and releasing an album.
Links
Mathilde’s Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2IbFedFwENhWWe5WcudJji.
Tera Geet – Music Focused Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/terageetkaur.
Yoga Focused Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/mathildetorrez1.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100072446643103.
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/artist/218695505.
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@terageet.
Website: https://www.prana-motion-yoga.com.