Iasos, New Age pioneer, dead at 77
The pioneer of New Age music, Iasos, died on January 6th at the age of 77. The news was confirmed by the late innovator’s producer and friend, Carlos Niño, which Douglas McGowan of Yoga Records shared.
Notably, Iasos was born in Greece on January 9th, 1947, and moved with his family to Malone, upstate New York, at four. He learned piano and flute as a child and later played in his school band. After school, he enrolled in Cornell University, playing in jazz and rock groups, which opened his life up to a career in music before graduating in 1968.
After leaving higher education, he relocated to Berkley, California, to fully pursue a musical career. There, he became deeply ensconced in the area’s thriving psychedelic scene, and it was around this time that he began hearing what he described as “paradise music” in his head. This was influenced by composers such as Ottorino Respighi, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy, as well as rock icon Jimi Hendrix.
Iasos would describe his paradise music – which was also dubbed inter-dimensional music – as an: “Earth reproduction of music that exists here and now in other dimensions.” He believed the sounds he was hearing were from a plane named Vista.
Iasos released his pioneering debut album Inter-Dimensional Music in 1975, and that year, he played the electric flute on another ground-breaking New Age album, Spectrum Suite, by Steven Halpern. Other titles include the likes of Crystal Love and Realms of Light, with his most recent effort, September 2023’s ‘The Garden of Salathooslia‘.
“Our Dearest Brother, Friend, Guide, Mentor, Inspiration, and Great Visionary of Celestial Paradise Music has transitioned from his Earth Body today, Saturday, January 6, 2024,” Niño wrote in his message. “We invite you to please explore the vastness of Iasos. He poured his heart and soul into his Music and fully intended for it to raise vibrations on Earth, that we all would live in higher harmonic realisation of our unique potential, co-existing and co-creating together.”
Iasos was also known for creating his first New Age works with electronic effects on acoustic instruments and was at first sceptical of the power of early synthesisers. He hated how they sounded, but his opinion changed when he came across the RMI Keyboard Computer in the late 1970s.
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