Doe Paoro is the stage name of California-born Sonia Jill Kreitzer and her band, who are currently touring in the UK.

She has been singing and writing songs throughout her life without formal training, but a trip to India at the age of 27 had a major influence on her musical development.

“I happened to hear some singing one day while I was taking a hike.”

“I fell upon this Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts.”

“The singing was so so stunning I never heard anything like it so ethereal and I went there and asked them if I could learn a song from them and so I started studying and that began a multi-year mentorship where I was going to India and studying Tibetan opera singing.”

Doe then returned to the US and started one or two bands before the current one but she says the Tibetan music still resonated with her:

“Their music sounds like some sort of astral ancient echo,” she said.

“It's so ethereal I thought it's possible for the voice to sound that way.

“It's possible for the voice to kind of be this celestial channel between the sky and the earth and I wanted Doe Paoro to be a space where I could tell stories about women, where I could tell stories about this animate universe, where I could tell stories about nature and mythology and spirituality.”

Doe is very thankful that she has been able to travel widely around the world and massively expanding her horizons.

“Growing up in America my understanding of singing was very much just based on pop music.

“Then studying in these other cultures and learning from the Tibetans how music can be used to inspire the sacred, how it is a form of cultural preservation.

“A lot of those songs are adapted poems from former Dalai Lamas.

“I've studied for years in the Amazon with the Shipibo people who use singing as a form of direct healing through the voice, where the voice can be used to heal certain frequencies in people.”

Friday night’s performance in Totnes will be the second time she had visited the town whose unique vibe chimes so well with her music.

The set included songs from her latest album, Living Through Collapse, as well as music inspired by periods of study in the Amazon.

“Periods of deep study I've done in the Amazon with my teachers and what I came out with.

“These are my gems from my own healing process and in those periods of study-I'm fasting, I'm sitting with indigenous people for months at a time.”

Doe and her band will next perform in Glastonbury before travelling to Portsmouth.

She plans to begin writing a new record after further touring and said the group had also submitted their work for consideration for this year’s Grammy Awards.