Greater Mysteries is an immersive music project created by Emmy-nominated composer and artist Kelli Scarr. Drawing inspiration from the myth of Inanna and the initiatory rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries, this body of work leads listeners through a journey of descent, transformation, and return.

Woven from a deep reverence for the sacred cycles of nature, the music blends live instrumentation, voice, and improvisation into a sonic ritual—part concert, part ceremony. It began during an artist residency in Crete, with early recordings shaped by the raw landscapes of Iceland, and has continued to evolve through collaborative performance in the Hudson Valley.

Created entirely outside the traditional music industry, Greater Mysteries is guided by intuition, experimentation, and the belief that music can be a sacred offering. It is sustained by a growing community drawn to its vision of beauty, mystery, and meaningful exchange.

We are building something different here—a living myth for our time.

Thank you for being part of it.

THE PROJECT

We are honored to bring this work to resonant spaces that echo the mythic themes at the heart of the project. These are not traditional concerts, but living rites of passage - spaces where the boundary between artist and audience dissolves, and music becomes a vessel for personal and communal transformation.

At its core, Greater Mysteries is about connection: to story, to land, to spirit, and one another. In a time of deep cultural change, it offers an opportunity to gather, to listen, and to remember what it means to be human - together.

THE EXPERIENCE

Meet the ARTISTS

Greater Mysteries is brought to life by a widening circle of collaborators. Each one brings a unique current of artistry, devotion, and care—together creating the container we will step into.


  • Producer

    Kelli Scarr is an American musician, composer and producer based in New York's Hudson Valley. She is also the founder of Vera Jean Music, a pioneering record label dedicated to championing the talents of women artists over the age of 40. Her latest project, Greater Mysteries, is an immersive album and performance experience that draws on timeless mythic journeys to the underworld. Born from an artist residency in Crete, and recorded in Iceland, the album invites listeners to connect with their own cycles of transformation. Learn more at kelliscarr.com


  • Music Director

    Sam Kassirer is a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and mixing engineer based in Medford, Massachusetts. Best known for his long-running collaboration with Josh Ritter, Kassirer has toured internationally and built a reputation as a versatile musician equally at home on stage and in the studio.

    Born and raised in the Boston area, he fell in love with music at age nine after discovering jazz and the freedom of improvisation. He went on to study Jazz Performance at New York University, where chance connections led him to begin touring with Ritter just as he graduated—a creative partnership that continues to shape his career.

    In 2006, Kassirer founded The Great North Sound Society, a recording studio housed in a converted farmhouse in southern Maine. Since then, he has produced and mixed records for artists across genres and around the world, while continuing to perform and collaborate widely. His work has been featured in outlets including The Boston Globe.

  • The Mid Hudson Valley Threshold Choir was formed in Kingston, New York in January 2023. We honor the ancient tradition of singing at the bedsides for those who are at the thresholds of living and dying.

    Threshold singers bring a calm presence, blended lullaby voices, and simple harmonies to give kindness and comfort to those at the threshold and to their loved ones who may be present at the bedside. When invited we come as two or three singers to offer songs that carry messages of love, strength, healing, and peace.

    Our song service is non-denominational and provided without cost.

  • Drums

    Musician Otto Hauser is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, DJ, and educator best known for his work as a drummer.

    In addition to solo performances, Hauser directs the ensemble Expectations and jointly leads the groups Etheric Currents, Half Hearts, and the Gamble/Hauser/Wood Trio. Over the past thirty years, he has performed on hundreds of albums and innumerable concerts across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with a diverse array of artists such as folk legends Kath Bloom, Vashti Bunyan, Mike Heron, Michael Hurley, and Bert Jansch; rockers The Black Crowes, Gary Louris, Philip Selway, Tommy Stinson, Jeff Tweedy, Tony Visconti, and The War on Drugs; jazz giants Don Byron, Chuck Mangione, Ed Mann, and Clark Terry; drum legends Steve Gadd and Bobby Previte; the inestimable Kevin Ayers and Meshell Ndegeocello; chanteuses Tracy Bonham, Joan Osbourne, and Martha Wainwright; lauded children’s music act Lucky Diaz & The Family Jam Band; and many contemporary indie and folk acts, including Nat Baldwin, Devendra Banhart, Richard Buckner, Diane Cluck, Espers, Josephine Foster, Fruit Bats, Cass McCombs, Joan As Police Woman, Juana Molina, Marissa Nadler, Elvis Perkins, Luke Temple, Sharon Van Etten, Vetiver, and Jonathan Wilson. 

    Hauser is a proud endorser of Istanbul Agop cymbals and C&C Custom drums.

    Originally from Rochester, New York, Otto currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

  • MYTHOLOGIST

    Catherine Svehla is a mythologist, storyteller, artist, and mentor. She works with artists and other creative people to realize their visions. She guides people through work/life transitions by connecting them with their inner wisdom. She is the creator of the Myth Matters podcast and shares the transformative power of myths and fairytales through story based workshops and events. Catherine holds a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute and has been working the liminal fields of myth, creativity, and consciousness for 30 years. Learn more at mythicmojo.com

  • Featured Vocalist

    Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary vocalist and composer. At the locus of her interests are performance practices, gesture, textural harmony, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, in works spanning chamber music to vocal pieces and collages of musique concrète. Her solo vocal work extends the dimension and expression of the voice and body, creating a sonic and physical panorama of silence to noise and tenderness to grandeur. 

  • Bassist

    CILLA BONNIE IS A SELF-MADE ARTIST WHO PUTS A FRESH SPIN ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SINGER/SONGWRITER BY DOING SO ON BASS GUITAR. WITH OVER 20 YEARS IN THE BIZ AS A WORKING BASS PLAYER, BONNIE ALWAYS MAKES TIME TO PRIORITIZE AND CULTIVATE HER OWN VOICE.

    BONNIE’S MUSIC ECHOES HER MUSICAL HEROES WITH GROOVY R&B-ESQUE VIBES AND STRUCTURAL ROCK

    WHETHER CAPTIVATING A ROOM ON SOLO BASS & VOCAL OR GETTING THE WHOLE PLACE TO TAP THEIR FEET WITH HER TRIO, CILLA BONNIE IS AN ARTIST WITH A TRULY UNIQUE SOUND. .

  • Woodwinds

    Matt Bauder is a distinguished saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader and side-man.  Critics say he “has a gift for isolating a musical language, mastering it and then introducing a personalizing twist” (Downbeat, 2011). His “strategic output combines ferocious improvisational activities that rattle the senses with compositions and movements that could soothe the savage beast” (All About Jazz, 2014).

    Bauder currently leads Day in Pictures and Hearing Things. The former is a classic jazz quintet; the latter is a foot-stomping organ trio. As a sideman, he thrives in many musical worlds from Arcade Fire, Iron & Wine and the Sway Machinery to Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra and Harris Eisenstadt’s Canada Day Quintet. He has collaborated for more than a decade with Aaron Siegel and Zach Wallace, making three albums of improvised soundscapes as Memorize the Sky.  Bauder’s many collaborations with multidisciplinary artist Aki Sasamoto have been presented at The Whitney, The Kitchen and The Chocolate Factory Theater.

    Bauder’s roots are in Jazz, nurtured in college by the tutelage of Detroit bebop guru Donald Walden. However further studies in experimental composition and sound installation with Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier and Ron Quivila set the stage for his evolving artistic fervor.

    While a member of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra he played alongside some of avant garde Jazz’s most legendary figures including Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, and Fred Anderson.  In his 10 plus years in Brooklyn he has performed with a cross section of forward-thinking peers, and has toured throughout North and South America, Europe, The Middle East and Asia.

    Recent awards include a 2014 Downbeat’s Critic’s poll entry for rising star saxophonist and a 2011 Music OMI musician residency. His recorded output as a leader/collaborator has been thoughtfully curated and has received near unanimous critical praise. As a sideman his discography is diverse and expansive.

  • Nourishment

    Tanya is an artist—in process, perspective, and creation. Over the last decade, her artistry has materialized through work as a forest farmer, plant steward, herbalist, and kitchen witch. Plants and food are her principal mediums at present, and while each holds distinct healing characteristics, she believes that any medium can serve as a channel for creativity, reverence, and our inherent connection.

    Of Japanese-Spanish heritage and Canadian by birth, Tanya now makes her home in the Hudson Valley of New York. Raised within contrasting cultural traditions and shaped by extensive travel, she was called to the inner work of reconciling dissonance, a task that once left her feeling isolated and confused. Through intimacy with nature, she came to recognize that separation is an illusion. Surrendering to paradox and the infinite depth of connectivity within the natural world has been the central healing of her lifetime.

    Her professional path has been wide-ranging: creative director in the fashion industry, team manager for the world’s largest wild-simulated ginseng farm, contributor to botanical product development and manufacturing, as well as farmer and cook. The guidance of nature has led her home to her true calling—as a conduit for plant medicines to be regeneratively integrated into the world. At heart, she holds the truth that all being is relatedness, and that every one of us desires to be heard, seen, and respected. This is the reality she communicates and cultivates through her work.

  • Strategic Consultant

    A designer by trade, Gretchen combines keen aesthetic insight and expression skills with

    polished business acumen. An award-winning fashion director with an MBA from the University

    of the Arts London and winner of Project Runway S8, she is now a business strategist and advising partner to founders and creative leaders around the world.

    Weird Specialty—Gretchen's advisory practice, studio, and salon—works exclusively with contemporary, values-driven creative entrepreneurs ranging from interior design to designers and florists to film directors and health & wellness practitioners and beyond. She uses her skills to guide and inspire thinking differently—extinguishing bias, squashing subjectivity, and illuminating intention for the creative class that makes our world a beautiful, rewarding place to live.

  • TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

    While primarily known a production sound mixer and voice artist, Carl Welden is also a longtime veteran of theater, radio, film and live event production. 

    Whether he's onstage, backstage, in studios, or on location, Carl is grateful to be able to make a living in the arts & entertainment industry throughout northeast (but especially at home in the Catskills and Hudson Valley). He’s been doing events at the Widow Jane Mine since the mid ‘90s.

    PHOTO CREDIT:  Kristopher Johnson

  • Artist

    Forever chasing the light and playing with textures, today she leads AR Studio –
    a home for an evolving collection of her own artwork and collaborations that celebrate New York-based artists and vintage objects. Curating to create a mood - layering texture and style, mixing technique, crossing eras, all an homage to create a beautiful moment to get lost in.

  • LEAD SOUND ENGINEER

  • Ritualist

    Mary Evelyn Pritchard is an artist, ritualist and community builder who’s work centers on creating sacred spaces and experiences.

    For the last decade she has worked in the Healing Arts as a Feng Shui practitioner & designer, meanwhile, actively exploring the realms of embodiment and eros through study and personal practice with a focus on the Earth and the Sacred Feminine.

    She has a particular passion for facilitating community ritual and ceremony as a pathway to individual and collective transformation and healing. 

Contact us