Galaxy in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane
taken from the album World Galaxy
No, you are not mistaken: it is yet another song by a harpist that surfaces on my blog. I am obsessed with the harp, and this stunningly beautiful piece has appeared on my player more than a few times during the past couple of months. If I had to use only one word to describe Galaxy in Satchidananda, I would go with “lush.” If I were to explain to someone what the word “lush” means, I would make them listen to Galaxy in Satchidananda.
Considering that Alice Coltrane’s music, which could be classified as avant-garde jazz, was heavily influenced by Indian music and culture, it is rather obvious that the title Galaxy in Satchidananda alludes to the famous Indian spiritual authority and Yogi Swami Satchidananda, whose speech was featured in the album’s final track A Love Supreme. And it is evident that his and other thinkers’ philosophies were referenced by Coltrane in her hypnotizing soundscapes on World Galaxy. Her ability to channel the spirit of Indian music, showcasing its mesmerizing lushness, was truly enthralling. In a more literal understanding of the title, however, she did indeed create an extraordinarily complex, multi-dimensional galaxy in which there is beauty and ugliness, harmony and chaos, joy and despair, subtlety and overwhelming grandness, stillness and transition. This is what life is about; this is how the cosmos operates. And Coltrane depicted it all in exquisite detail, using sounds as her paint and silence as her canvas.
Furthermore, there is a very interesting dissonance between Alice Coltrane’s depiction of the spiritual cosmic motif and conventional attitudes focusing on the mechanical or science fiction-inspired aspects of the universe. Through the deliberate use of acoustic and raw-sounding instruments, Coltrane created an aesthetic that represents her own spiritual beliefs, which had, again, directly derived from Hinduism. She builds a bridge between the Earth, or even a single individual, and the rest of the Universe. She reunites them. To achieve that, she does not resort to any technical advances in order to accomplish that: the connection is purely spiritual. Although I am not religious, I find this vision beautiful and compelling.
Musically speaking, the album World Galaxy, with the song Galaxy in Satchidananda as its highlight, is nothing short of masterful. It exhibits too much ethereal excellence to describe with words. The string orchestra, which plays some of the most haunting parts on the record, gives the listener a sense of experiencing an unusual phenomenon and further enhances the vision of the world and the universe as something unimaginably massive in scope. The arrangements, although they might at first seem slightly repetitive, are in fact incredibly detailed and dynamic: they introduce slight alterations to articulation and timing, pushing the song gently through time and space.
There is something about World Galaxy that I find hard to explain, however. It feels somewhat ancient, but not in a pejorative way. I would say it is ancient in the sense it is eternal.
vaporwave
blakekathryn
discoholicmusic
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
turnnoffyourmind
amandla
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
