Electronic Artist Ray Lynch R.I.P. 7/3/1943-12/22/2025

R.I.P Electronic Artist Ray Lynch - Clouds Below His Knees

by John Diliberto 2/5/2026

Ray Lynch
July 3, 1943 – December 22, 2025

Without a whisper, composer and electronic artist Ray Lynch has left the planet, passing on December 22, 2025 reportedly after a fall. The only notice of it at this writing has been on his Facebook page on February 3 and Instagram page on February 5..

Ray Lynch arrived as New Age music was cresting, releasing his third and most popular album, Deep Breakfast, in 1984. It ultimately went platinum and became one of the biggest New Age records of all time, which was remarkable coming from an independent label, Music West.

Born July 3, 1943, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Lynch grew up in a musical and artistic family and began studying piano at age six, later expanding his training to guitar and lute. Inspired by classical figures such as Andrés Segovia, he pursued formal music studies in Texas and Spain before establishing himself as a composer and recording artist. While living in Maine, he fell under the spell of Dafree John, also known as Avatar Adi Da Samraj, a cult figure who Lynch credited with changing the course of his life in the mid-1970s.

“My life up to that point had reached a crisis point anyway,” he told me for his Echoes feature in 1989. “There is always a synchronicity in these matters. You know when you need a teacher he appears. And that is what happened at that time.”

Many of Lynch’s titles over subsequent years, like “Falling in the Garden,” “The Oh of Pleasure” and “Tiny Geometries” are taken from the writings of Dafree John. He moved to California to “study” with Adi Da and that’s where he remained. His first album, Truth is the Only Profound, featured Lynch’s original quasi-classical chamber music under readings by Adi Da Samraj. His next album, The Sky of Mind, in 1983, jettisoned the spiritual readings in favor of more classical derived chamber pieces with some Tibetan bells and Indian tambura thrown in.

It was his third recording, Deep Breakfast, that truly launched Lynch as a major artist in the new age field. Except for some flute and viola, he traded orchestral instruments for synthesizers, arriving at an effervescent pop sound with an aura of mysticism. He was infatuated with arpeggiators and simple sequences and worked a pop sound that was Gershon-Kingsley’s Popcorn via Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene, with simple, almost nursery rhyme top-lines.

One song in particular, “Celestial Soda Pop” became a signature piece. Many became aware of his music when it was frequently inserted as a “bumper” on NPR’s All Things Considered broadcast. It became so popular on the network that the show was compelled to interview him. The album eventually reached platinum sales and was one of the first new-age–format records to sell in the hundreds of thousands.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lynch continued to record and release music that resonated with a widely devoted audience. No Blue Thing (1989) topped new-age charts. His final album, Nothing Above My Shoulders but the Evening (1993) found him returning a bit to conventional instrumentation and his classical background. Lynch dominated Billboard’s New Age charts with Deep Breakfast getting to number 2 and No Blue Thing and Nothing Above My Shoulders but the Evening each reaching no.1.

Lynch’s music could be cloying in its romantic leanings and saccharine in its pop tendencies. His final album in 1993, was full of swooning strings from members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. If you came to his electronic music from Klaus Schulze, Synergy, Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach, Lynch’s music seemed slight by comparison.

After a period of creative activity spanning close to two decades, Lynch retired from active recording around 2000. His house and recording studio were burnt to the ground in the 2015 Valley Fire in California.

Ray Lynch died on December 22, 2025, at the age of 82. At the time of his passing he had been married for nearly five decades to his wife Kathleen.

Lynch’s legacy is open to question. He had a large fan base in the 1980s and 90s, but he has rarely been mentioned in this millennium. His music is rarely if ever played in places like Sirus/XM’s Spa Channel and unlike many popular electronic artists from the past, I can find no recording where he has been sampled, and there is sample candy there. Even Lynch himself didn’t think he was in the vanguard.

“As anybody can tell who listens to my music, I’m not an innovator at all and have no intention of being one,” he confessed in his 1989 Echoes interview. “I’m not interested in re-inventing the wheel. It’s just traditional Western music.”

Well, it wasn’t that traditional. Ray Lynch definitely left his mark for those who loved his music. He should certainly be remembered and not just quietly laid to rest, his death not mentioned, his life not remembered.