Channeling the Infinite: Alice Coltrane’s Astral TV, Exhibition, and Book

A lost TV series, a landmark exhibition, and a reissued book bring her transcendental vision back into focus.

Late-night television was a singular platform in the 1980s, especially the independent station KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles. A playground for the strange, the subversive, and the unexpected, programs like Peter Ivers’ New Wave Theatre, Elvira vehicle Movie Macabre, and syndicated music series Night Flight thrived in the after-hours blur. It was a heady time, with cable television expanding its reach, the Fox Network beginning its ascent, and videocassette recorders making low-budget, high-concept productions more accessible than ever.

Amid this visionary mix, Eternity’s Pillar stood apart, offering not coked-up nihilism or camp horror but a meditative journey into sound, spirit, and transcendence, guided by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. Long inaccessible in Coltrane’s archives, in February four episodes of the show premiered on the Criterion Collection. Their arrival is timed to coincide with Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal, at the Hammer Museum. Running through May 4, the exhibition is part of a broader initiative called “The Year of Alice.”

Per the Hammer:

The exhibition presents works by contemporary American artists paired with ephemera from Coltrane’s personal archive. Featuring a range of mediums including video, installation, performance, and sculpture together with Coltrane’s archival hand-written correspondence, unreleased audio recordings, and rarely seen video footage, Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal explores themes including spiritual transcendence, sonic innovation, and architectural intimacy to honor Coltrane’s cultural output and practice.

In promoting Eternity’s Pillar, the Criterion Collection describes the series as “a journey through the astral plane created and hosted by jazz visionary and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. Blending music, meditation, chanting, and an avant-garde video-art aesthetic, this singular audiovisual experience — four episodes of which are presented here — is a sublimely cosmic expression of Coltrane’s deep-held belief in music’s capacity to attain spiritual transcendence.”

Our friends at dublab posted one episode of the show on their YouTube channel.

Another fascinating Coltrane document, and the inspiration for the exhibition’s name, has also returned: Monument Eternal, her 1977 book. A brief tome at 64 pages, she wrote that it was “based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” Republished in early February by Akashic Books, Monument Eternal dives deep into Coltrane’s musical journey, following her transformation from Alice McLeod, a Detroit church organist and bebop player, to Swami Turiyasangitananda, an LA-based visionary spiritual leader.