Few reissues evoke as much excitement as Alice Coltrane’s Ashram Tapes. Not only because these four recordings had been out of circulation for decades, but also because, throughout all that time, they have carried an almost mythical aura. Recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, during the period when the composer withdrew from the music industry to establish a spiritual community in California, they collect devotional songs in which spiritual jazz, Hindu chants, gospel, organs, and surprisingly cosmic synthesizers coexist in a sound that, when heard today, seems ahead of much of contemporary ambient music.
Up to now, access was limited to only part of the material. The compilation The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda — whose cover features a small pink-dressed Doja Cat — recovered several tracks in 2017, while Kirtan: Turiya Sings (2021) salvaged the first of the tapes, though in an early mix distinct from the original. Matador Records will now release all four Ashram Tapes in full for the first time, preserving the mixes, the order of tracks, and the sleeves with which they were conceived. They will stop being remote, nearly untraceable artifacts, and will begin circulating again.
Unlike other enduring works in her discography, such as Huntington Ashram Monastery, released by Impulse! in 1969, these tapes were never produced with the intention of entering the market. Alice Coltrane recorded, edited, and distributed them exclusively among the members of her spiritual community, outside any label, and without any intention of commercial release. They were, in essence, DIY releases designed to accompany a religious and artistic practice, not to be sold in stores, nor to dress up for modernity or to populate year-end lists.
Perhaps that is why it feels so alluring that, decades later, those same tapes have become cult objects pursued by collectors — a user on Pitchfork’s Instagram describes finding a copy on Discogs with shipping costs of 600 euros — and are now being reclaimed by one of the most influential independent labels in the world. There is something ironical, and also beautiful, in a music created at the margins of the industry becoming one of the year’s major musical events.
There is a temptation to claim the Ashram Tapes as “ahead of their time,” a kind of proto-ambient or spiritual electronics before those terms existed. Yet such an interpretation probably says more about us than about Alice Coltrane. She did not seem interested in sounding modern, experimental, or particularly cool. Having left the music business, she used synthesizers, organs, and choirs precisely because they were the tools she could wield to shape a religious and artistic experience. The modernity of these tapes is, in a sense, an accidental byproduct.
What is striking is that pieces like Atma Rama, with its rising synthesizers and an almost extraterrestrial atmosphere, or Om Shanti, can evoke a sense of the transcendent even for listeners wholly unfamiliar with the religious practice for which they were created. Like Fairuz, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali, or contemporary artists such as Arooj Aftab, faith can be the source of the music, yet it does not constrain its power to move.
