Iasos Enters a New Dimension: An Echoes Tribute.
We lost a pioneer of New Age music. He wasn’t as well-known as Yanni, Enya or even Steven Halpern. He didn’t record on signature labels like Windham Hill or Narada records. But Iasos was there at the very dawn of new age music in 1975 when he released his debut album, Interdimensional Music. Iasos mixed mysticism and music, crafting often expansive landscapes that we thought of as space music at the time, before New age took over as the marketing term.
Inter-Dimensional Music and Steven Halpern’s Spectrum Suite, released the same year, were the first trips into the modern new age movement. Iasos was born in Greece but grew up in America. He taught himself flute and piano and by the time he moved to the San Francsico Bay area, he was hearing a sound that wasn’t really out there yet. He combined his acoustic instruments, including lap-steel guitar. with tape manipulations and synthesizers to create albums like Elixir, Jeweled Space and Realms of Light. These were subtle works that were often more avant-garde than new new age, but all had a mood. Iasos lived deep in the mystic, claiming his music came from other dimensions and citing works like Francis Bacon’s 16th century book, New Atlantis, as well as The Urantia Book. Iasos died on January 6. He was 77 years old. We remember him tonight on Echoes.
Read John Diliberto’s Tribute to Iasos