Electronic World Fusionist, David Parsons, Dead at 80
by John Diliberto 2/25/2025
New Zealand composer David Parsons has left the planet, departing off the Tibetan Plateau to join the Mothership.
David Parsons was on the feathered edge of New Age, Ambient and World fusion music. He released his debut, Sounds of The Mothership in 1980. It was an album layering synthesizers with environmental sounds, which became de riquer in the New Age. But Parsons usually had a more darkly shadowed take, sometimes with dense and dissonant layers. He was initially inspired by Wendy Carlos’s proto-ambient masterpiece, Sonic Seasonings, with her Moog synthesizer weaving through environmental soundscapes.
He also played the sitar. After seeing Ravi Shankar in 1965 he became enthralled with all things Indian, as well as Tibetan. He wound up studying the sitar in India with Krishna Chakravarty. He then incorporated it into many of his early albums. His 1990 double CD album, Yatra, was a brilliant and elaborately layered fusion of East and West. Dorje Ling took it even further with sensual, throbbing percussion grooves and whirling arabesques of shenai-like synthesizer, Tibetan Monk growls merging with subharmonic synthesizers. That’s on “Tantra” on tracks like “Lahaul Valley” he heads into eerie, slow motion space.
Parsons was initially discovered by Ethan Edgecombe in America and recorded on his Fortuna Records label. Fortuna was subsequently absorbed into Eckart Rahn’s Celestial Harmonies, where most of his major work resides.
Rahn made it possible for Parsons to take a lot of the 1990s off from making his own music and to become a a musicologist, traversing Indonesia, India, Bali, Armenia, South East Asia and the Middle East, recording and compiling definitive collections of traditional music for Celestial Harmonies. Among them are the 17 volume Music of Islam series, Sacred Ceremonies: Ritual Music of Tibetan Buddhism, The Music of Vietnam and the 3 volume Music of Cambodia. But he returned to his own music in 1999 with Ngaio Gamelan, followed quickly by Shaman.
Version 1.0.0
Shaman was prototypical Parsons, with vintage 70s style synthesizer sequences pounding out rhythms to the heavens. He merged sounds from his travels, including ghostly Middle Eastern violins, winds and percussion, mutating them through his processing, setting them in an electronic whirl that evoked the Sufi dervishes Parsons had documented. He was considered New Age but Shaman, like much of his music, is a sometimes harrowing, occasionally abrasive, but always compelling soundtrack from the other another world.
Parsons picked up many instruments along the way, including Indian esraj, sarangi and vina. When he didn’t play it, he sampled it. His final album was Forgotten Dreams in 2023. It’s one of his more serene albums, hovering between drone zone and minimalism, but still using deep layers and sounds on the edge of dissonance.
David Parsons departed on February 15, 2025 at the age of 80. He leaves behind his wife, Kay, three children, Wendy, Sarah and Anna, and two grandchildren, Sally and Raulin.
Sadly, while I reviewed many of his records and played him on Echoes, I never got to sit down and talk to this profound musician who sat alongside Steve Roach, Robert Rich and Michael Stearns in the pantheon of electronic artists who came out in the 1980s.
I would have loved to hear that interview with such a giant.