Karen Salicath Jamali has spent the better part of a decade building a body of work that arrives, by her own account, less through craft than through channel: dreams, near-death visions, and an “angelic presence” that she says reshaped her relationship to sound after a 2012 head injury. With OM Mare Shangri-la, she steps forward for the first time as a singer-songwriter rather than purely an instrumentalist, adding voice, lyrics, and acoustic guitar to the meditative piano work that has defined her catalogue.
It’s a genuine turning point for an artist whose story is unusual even by the standards of late-blooming musicians: self-taught, never having played piano before her recovery, she has since built a catalogue of more than 2,500 compositions and nine albums, and has performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall on eight occasions.
The Sound: Where She Sits in the Landscape
OM Mare Shangri-la plants itself firmly in the tradition of contemplative, spiritually-oriented music — a lineage that includes some genuinely major names:
Enya is the most obvious reference point. Both artists work in atmospheric, reverb-drenched soundscapes built around themes of unity, timelessness, and the numinous; both trade in a kind of vocal music meant to still the listener rather than move a dancefloor. Where Enya’s productions are dense, layered, and studio-built, Jamali’s approach — voice, acoustic guitar, “gentle percussion” — is sparser and more intimate, closer to a live confession than a cathedral of overdubs.
Loreena McKennitt is another useful comparison: a similarly literary, mystic sensibility, with music positioned as a vessel for larger ideas about consciousness and human connection rather than as a pop vehicle.
Alanis Morissette‘s more spiritually-inflected later work, or Jewel‘s confessional folk records, are a reasonable touchstone for what she’s attempting on the vocal side: plainspoken, first-person songs about love, the soul, and impermanence, delivered without much production armor.
The Team Behind the Curtain
What does lend the album some credibility by association is its production pedigree. Mastering engineer Maria Triana spent roughly two decades at Sony Music working with artists including Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Sting; producer Gary Gray has industry ties running through Disney, EMI, and collaborators like Quincy Jones and Phil Collins; and Austin Leeds, who mastered the track “Seeds of God,” has a dance-music pedigree via Bedrock and Ultra Music. That’s a genuinely accomplished crew for an independent release, and it suggests a level of craft applied to Jamali’s raw, dream-derived material that should be reflected in the album’s polish, whatever one makes of the mythology surrounding its origin.
OM Mare Shangri-la is best understood not as a bid to sit alongside pop’s biggest names, but as a sincere, well-produced entry in music’s long-running new-age and contemplative tradition — a genre where Enya, McKennitt, Yanni, and Einaudi remain the standard-bearers. Jamali’s origin story is more dramatic than most in that space, and her vocal debut is a real risk after a decade as a purely instrumental artist. Whether her songwriting can carry the same emotional weight as her piano work is the album’s central open question — one only the nine songs themselves, once released, can answer.
