Chris Rael
American musician
Chris Rael is an eclectic American musician, singer, composer, and songwriter.
He is the founder and leader of Indo-pop band Church of Betty, based in New York City. He has composed, recorded, and produced more than 25 CDs, collaborating with artists from around the world. He is the founder of indie label Fang Records, and has produced hundreds of live events in downtown New York City.
Rael was a pioneer in the progressive music movement at the original Knitting Factory in New York in the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, he studied Hindustani classical singing and sitar in Varanasi, India, forging a world-orchestral-pop style. The Village Voice has noted that “Chris Rael has consistently blended rock and Indian music better than any Western guitar guy, ever.” He produced Najma Akhtar's 1996 album, Forbidden Kiss.
His genres, besides Indo-pop, include progressive, chamber, and film/theater music. He composed and produced three Bollywood-parody songs for the 2003 film Cosmopolitan. In 2005, he received the Outstanding Soundtrack Award, out of a field of 230 film composers, at the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Los Angeles, for the Lower East Side Biography Project's Queer Realities and Cultural Amnesia.
“Chris Rael” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chris, Rael and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5107819. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2003 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chris Rael” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.