For many years we try putting our band Ashram back together. In the past we were trying to compose new songs for a third album. Our over-continental music project was and isn’t easy, because we put a lot of money and time in the productions and concert tours in recent years. Similar like a friend of mine always used to say: Too often I bite on granite. In this case, we bit on granite several times. However, the idea of Ashram doesn’t let us go, as people keep asking why we stopped making music with Ashram. We had some difficult times, especially on our last tour in 2011, where unfortunately we missed the return flights of our Indian musicians due to a traffic jam. At that time, we vowed to leave this musical project to be able to feel free again, simply because the organization and the financial burdens were too strong. According the motto of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, we may still in love with our chains. – The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature. – Sri Aurobindo
https://aurosociety.org/
What Ashram has to do with the terms of chains and love or being in love with our chains is hard for me to describe, if it’s love, then certainly a form of love-hate relationship (maybe it’s just chain love as Aurobindo said). That’s my personal definition. Anyway, we feel like Ashram should try again to make music together. Therefore, we are currently planning a major project, with plenty of preparation time, so this time nothing should goes wrong. We plan to produce a tribute album for Hermann Hesse in 2022 (especially for his masterpiece Siddhartha – an Indian poetry). At the moment we are in the creative and organizational period in India. We already had very constructive talks with, for example, the Kerala Cultural Exchange Department Center. Coincidentally, there was an interesting lecture recently on the subject of Hesse and Siddhartha at the University of Trivandrum by Prof. Dr. Vridhagiri Ganeshan.
India is already preparing for the Siddhartha Jubilee 2022. So we are planning a bigger India concert tour for 2022, where we want to present our Siddhartha album live on stage. However, we don’t want to anticipate too far, as we are currently dealing first with legal matters (publishing law Suhrkamp). I hope everything goes well, we don’t expect that we will have any financial benefits, but of course everything has to be clarified before we will publish the „Siddhartha Tribute Album“. Of course we don’t want to get in conflict with copyrights or publishing rights. In an emergency, our album might have to be titled differently. The songs are written by us anyway, without using direct quotations from the book Siddhartha. If you want to know more about our project, you should take a look at our new created Ashram Instapage „ashram_music“
https://www.instagram.com/ashram_music/?hl=de
I would like to conclude this blog article in the words of Hermann Hesse: One must try the impossible to achieve the possible.