Iasos' Encyclopedia of Inter-Dimensional Music

I covered some of Iasos' 70's releases a few years back.  I rated them pretty highly at the time, and I'd probably kick up the score a few notches these days.  Here are those links:

Inter-Dimensional Music
Angelic Music

They have permeated my life more and more over the years.  I've only got an 8GB iPod these days (a pink one just like Zootopia's Judy Hopps, but with an apple instead of a carrot - it used to be my wife's) and Iasos always makes the cut.

Now - the school I work at tends to play terrible pop music in the lobby.  Sometimes I sneak to the computer and switch it to something groovier.  Last week I threw in Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way" and a Bob Marley best of.  And then I thought to put in Iasos.  Y'know, something good to study too.

I found that the man has produced plenty more music all the way up to the present, and has some fantastic Youtube lectures on music to boot. The music was absolutely groovy in the lobby, and I had to contact the man himself.  He came across as a very enlightened being over email and got me set up with some of his more modern music.

You could look him up on Youtube for whatever, but I'm going to share with a full-on wealth of Atlantean vibrational tones that the man has been putting out for decades now.  There's a bit more of the digital nowadays, but if you can put the soul behind those virtual instruments, then the ends justify the means. Iasos is aurally enlightening souls and doing no harm as far as I can tell, so the digital ends can justify the absolutely engroovied ends in this case.

Now - you may think that's cool, but dear Doctor, Iasos is just recycling New Age tropes.  Let's reiterate that this guy invented most of those tropes.  If you are familiar with Jane Roberts' Seth Material, I have pretty much considered Iasos' 70's recordings as the soundtrack to that.  Now I've got more.  And so do you!

I'd head for "Essence of Lemuria" to start with, and I'm embedding that one.  Click on the banner and you can scroll down for the links to the aforementioned "Inter-Dimensional Music" or "Angelic Sound," along with plenty of other tones to vibrate the Great Pyramid.



I went rapping about metaphysics with Iasos as well, and he directed me to the metaphysics page at his website.  It's a fun primer to head into a playground of the mind.  Again, I'm a sucker for Jane Roberts and Seth and I've handed out "The Nature of Personal Reality" to folks multiple times (most recently to dear old Dad):

Iasos' Metaphysics

Iasos - 1978 - Angelic Music

Quality: 4 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 4.5 out of 5

We'll send our spirits a little deeper into the aether of transcendental existence with this undeniably early new age effort from Iasos.  Now, I know 'new age' tends to be a bit of a dirty word, especially for us music heads, but this release has the fortune of coming out at magic moment when there genre was pretty much fully formed, but analog synthesizers and tape hiss dirtied up the sound's pristine face a little bit.  This really helps to humanize the music in a way that would end up mostly lost once John Tesh fired up his arsenal of keyboars, spewing them out onto sterile digital gloss.  Not so here: the tones will relax you, and perhaps mystically lobotomize you if you're into that sort of thing, but they also sound like they're oozing out of the misty primordial forest, and not sproinging off of the D.A.T. (anyone remember those?) of a middle-aged L.A. power hipster with sunglasses and a pony tail.  Still, you'd best ignore the cover art, which seems to have come from a Shopping Channel special on crystal angel sculptures.

The tracks are split right into two thirty minute long album sides.  You can care that the track titles are "The Angels of Comfort" and "Angel Play," but knowing that probably doesn't matter for a whole lot as the music's spinning.  The sounds will greet your ears with giant pads of synthetic string sounds and the occasional babbling brook.  My hook for the whole affair was reading the notion that some of those who have had near-death experiences have apparently equated this album with the sounds of moving on.  That's got to make the thing worth a listen in my book.

Once upon a time, I rippity rapped a bit about an older Iasos album on this blog.  Really, I've still got to give that one the distinction of being better, but I'd admit that this one is a little more profound.  Perhaps a touch more mind expanding.  It's straight out of the short, halycon era when 'new age' might have ended up with a place in the lexicon of groovy instead of the dustbin of the Nature Company.

Iasos - 1975 - Inter-Dimensional Music

Quality: 4.5 out of 5

Trip-O-Meter: 4.75 out of 5

Here's an album that I know almost nothing about, but have found myself listening to incessantly. I imagined that Iasos was some kind of new age commune. If you visited their home, I thought you'd find them doing yoga while wearing tight pastel yellow tights and tank tops and frizzy hair, after which then insist that you join them for a trip to the wood-paneled vegetarian supermarket. I didn't want to spend time with them, but I was infatuated with their sounds. Then I look at the All Music Guide, and it said that Iasos is actually one guy who is considered one of the first artists of the new age musical genre. It kind of deflated my vision behind this album, but fortunately the music is still great. Yes, it is new age, but of the 70's variety with analog synthesizers and hazy, groovy taped production (as opposed to the Great Digital Recording Terror of the 80's). Yeah, it probably would have played in that wood-paneled health food store in the 70's, but you would have enjoyed the music and maybe you could have found that awesome Panda cherry licorice somewhere in the aisles of the store.

This is another one of those albums that really works as a continuous whole. It loses quite a bit of its vibe if you isolate the track. That said, when I'm particularly enamoured with a tune and take a look a the track listing, I've found that it's usually "Formentera Sunset Clouds," "Rainbow Canyon," "Angel Play," or the closing "Maha Splendor." The first half of the album tends to be the more tuneful half. Once Iasos 'gets you in the mood' so to speak, the music becomes far more ambient. This does end up making the second half a little more murky sounding (although "Angel Play" shines quite well) and "The Bubble Massage" ends up being just five minutes of percolating bubble sounds, which I could achieve on my own by sticking my head into a jacuzzi.

Really, though, this album is quite a trip and a very groovy musical time capsule of its era. It's on a slightly different plain of existence than Berlin schoolers like Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schultze, but these sound would actually complement those artists very well. So light your opium scented candles, recite a few verses you've memorized from the Bhagavad Gita, jump into your giant round hot tub with several big-haired sexually liberated women (or hairy chested, medallion-wearing men), and give this a play.