From Alice Coltrane’s devotional music to modern ambient interpretations of Sufi mysticism, synthesizers are everywhere in spiritual music. But what is it that makes synthesizers so attractive to those inclined towards the deeper mysteries? We spoke to four artists about their personal, transcendent relationships with synths.
In the early 1980s, jazz musician Alice Coltrane started incorporating the Oberheim OB-8 into her bhajans - traditional Hindu devotional songs performed at her ashram.
Best known for playing the harp, Coltrane - who was famously something of a luddite - embraced the OB-8 after her daughter Michelle recommended she check out modern synthesizers. “I said, Mom, you gotta check out Roland and Korg and all these products that are coming out,” Michelle said in an article in the Guardian. “The next thing you know, we’re on that Oberheim.”
You can hear the big analog poly all over the music on World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, a compilation collected from self-released cassettes from her ashram era.
