It’s a typical scene in Marin County, the affluent expanse north of San Francisco where countless hippies settled down after the Summer of Love. Iasos leans on a deck railing as a bountiful Northern California landscape sweeps behind his lanky frame and Bob Ross perm. A trombone and mute rest beside him. Every now and then the man lets out a high-pitched giggle, not unlike Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus: appropriate given that the film spoke of Mozart’s talent as divine, and this man is steadfastly convinced that the music in his head was beamed there by an angelic, inter-dimensional entity named Vista. “I feel honored that I’m working with him,” he titters, elated as a Rolling Stone on his way back from a session with Muddy Waters.
Iasos is being interviewed for a 1979 documentary by students at Marin College, four years after his debut, Inter-Dimensional Music, one of the first albums to pair new age philosophy with the glittering, celestial style of music that would soon come to bear the same name. The term initially referred to a set of unrelated movements that believed in a coming new age of spiritual enlightenment and human development—influenced by various Eastern philosophies, turn-of-the-century spiritual ideas like Theosophy, and 1950s UFO religions—many of which gained traction among the post-hippie milieu that had recently migrated to Marin. If you can sit through the Iasos interview without your eyes glazing over, you’ll hear a lot of these threads converge.
Even his best friends never learned his real name, which was not made public until after his death last year. Those friends recall a happy and jocular man who wasn’t always easy to meet on an earthly plane of conversation. “Let's put it this way,” said one friend decades later. “I cannot imagine anybody less likely to come to a Super Bowl party than Iasos.”
Iasos was born in 1947 in Greece to Jewish parents. His father was the only one on his side of the family to survive the Holocaust. When Iasos was four, his family moved to upstate New York, where he eventually attended Cornell University, playing in a bossa nova group called the Nova Shadow Quartet. Around this time, he started hearing what he called “paradise music” in his head, whose origin he could not trace and which he lacked the means to realize. After consulting with a psychic, he decided the music came from Vista, the Elohim of the Fifth Ray, whom he compared in interviews throughout his life to an “older brother.”
Jettisoning his initial plan to go to grad school and study anthropology, Iasos moved across the country to Berkeley, California, then found a houseboat in Sausalito, on the same harbor that inspired Otis Redding to write “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” He became an active figure in the local scene: his early credits include flute on the debut album by the Grateful Dead-affiliated Rowan Brothers and chimes on the self-titled album by singer-songwriter Pamela Polland. But he remained focused on the sounds he was hearing in his head. Living off cans of beans and borrowing what equipment he needed to document these transmissions from the higher realm, he jury-rigged a crude home studio and recorded what would become Inter-Dimensional Music.
Though Iasos claimed steadfastly that this music came to him from on high, he did reluctantly admit a few earthly influences: Debussy, Ravel, Jimi Hendrix, exotica great Martin Denny. The early-’70s Bay Area where he worked was a hub for music unbound by rhythm, home to the San Francisco Tape Music Center and the Mills College music program that boasted faculty like Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath—music that had trickled down from the academic avant-garde into more accessible, rock-adjacent forms like German kosmische and Brian Eno’s earliest ambient works. Iasos never cited any of these artists as influences, but his music fit naturally within this zeitgeist.
Stephen Hill, a Bay Area DJ who established the Hearts of Space radio show in 1973 to broadcast what he broadly called “contemplative music,” claims the new age genre was one of the first made possible by home recording. Before it became clear in the late ’70s and early ’80s that there was a market for this music, musicians had to record and release it themselves. Most of the genre’s earliest gems are private-press and small-batch oddities. Recorded on a reel-to-reel, Inter-Dimensional Music has an alluring, slightly fried quality. It sounds faded and corroded, very distant from the sources of its sounds, as if it’s traveled a long way to reach us.
This is insubstantial music by design, evocative of flickering phenomena like flames and shooting stars. From the opening comet-whoosh of “Libra Sunrise,” the album makes clear its almost single-minded pursuit of transcendent beauty. Save for “The Bubble Massage,” a proto-ASMR submersion into aqueous sound, there is almost no low end to speak of. It exists in the same register as birdsong, the voices of children, as Iasos’ curious Mozartean laugh. While ambient music often works at a glacial pace, this music leaps through the air, free from gravity.
Iasos loves slide guitar, which allows him to create incredible sweeps and gentle flutters. The flute, instrument of his childhood, dances freely, conjuring images of satyrs wreathed in laurels. (Vista is not the only god Iasos has worked with; he claims to have received a musical scale from Pan.) The piano does not sound real at all—it’s pearly, warped, slightly too lustrous, a memory of a piano. All these elements combine on “Lueena Coast,” the album’s most stunning track, which opens with scattered piano arpeggios and leaps into grand pirouettes of flute. Iasos’ voice can be faintly heard in the background, mouthing syllables through a thick sheet of reverb.
Avian whoops and titters abound in the margins of Inter-Dimensional Music, making explicit Iasos’ debt to Martin Denny’s exotica records of the 1950s, which used birdsong to put American listeners in the mind of some faraway tropical isle. “Lanua Cove,” available only on the original vinyl pressing, centers a conspicuously Denny-like vibraphone; though a distant, aqueous cymbal gives it some interest, it’s easier to think of tiki bars than transcendence while listening.
“Osiris Bull-Man & Elephant Walk,” a cartoonish approximation of “Ancient Egyptian” music, is the track that’s aged the worst. Iasos’ claim that these pseudo-Arabic scales implied a connection with the age of the pharaohs made clear his music was not immune to the infantilizing streak of exoticism that persists in new age, rooted in the idea that non-Western cultures and spiritualities are more in touch with some fundamental truth about the universe. It’s only thanks to the soupy mix and production grit that “Osiris” actually manages to sound a bit ancient, weathered by time and dust; once the ersatz Eastern melodies fade out, it meanders its way into a surprisingly strong psych-rock groove that’s the only audible instance of Iasos’ influence from Hendrix.
Inter-Dimensional Music doesn’t ever really sound like divine music. It sounds like a human’s approximation of divine music using the limited tools at their disposal. That’s what makes it undeniably cheesy at times, and also what makes it work. It’s a strange thing to say about music so outwardly languid, but it also feels urgent, as if this person was doing their damnedest to transcribe the cosmic music in their mind before it flickered out. The influences from the likes of Debussy and Denny, then, could be interpreted as Iasos’ way of filling in the gaps. Even his chintzy imitations of nature, like the water sounds on “The Bubble Massage” or the canned birdsong effects all over the album, have a hyperreal quality that’s spookier and more alluring than a pristine field recording would’ve been.
Iasos initially released Inter-Dimensional Music in a limited-run vinyl pressing, then quickly followed it up in 1976 with a tape version that included the seven-minute “Rainbow Canyon.” The version on streaming is the Japanese CD repress from 2005; this release combines most of the earlier versions in an hour of music but excludes “Lanua Cove,” still not available digitally. There’s no definitive version of Inter-Dimensional Music; the music’s haphazard presentation across different documents feels true to its visionary origin.
Inter-Dimensional Music came out a full half decade before the market for new age music was established. Precedents like Paul Horn’s Inside, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and Irv Teibel’s Environments had sold a lot of copies, but by explicitly presenting his music within a new age philosophical cosmos, Iasos pointed towards the intertwining of beatless, contemplative music and alternative spiritual practice that would hold the key to the music’s eventual commercial breakthrough. Albums like Inter-Dimensional Music and Steven Halpern’s 1975 Spectrum Suite, which featured Iasos and was presented as an aid for chakra-aligned healing, spent years sitting in alternative bookstores and healing shops before it became clear there was a formidable audience for this kind of music. In the 1980s, new age went mainstream: NPR picked up Hearts of Space for national syndication in 1983; the Grammys created an award for the genre in ’87; the new age label Windham Hill raked in tens of millions in sales.
Iasos never cashed in on the new age boom. Either unwilling or unable to make the same leap to Grammy considerations and gold certifications as his friend and collaborator Halpern, he continued to live in Marin, putting out classics like Angelic Music and Elixir but protecting his real name and personal life and performing only intermittently. He earned some infamy from a 1989 study at Plymouth State University, which suggested that “The Angels of Comfort” from Angelic Music, along with selections from Brian Eno and Jonn Serrie, sounded like what patients heard during near-death experiences. And he kept on recording whatever paradise music was still in his head, with results ranging from the stunning (Jeweled Space) to the terrifically strange (Bora Bora 2000, which alternates long synth meditations with synthesized tiki-lounge tracks just south of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell). He spent the last few years of his life in Maui, where he died in January.
Inter-Dimensional Music might have remained a historical footnote if not for the enthusiasm of American experimentalists 30 years later. In the 2000s and 2010s, a crop of underground artists took inspiration from early new age and synthesizer music, and by 2012, Iasos was playing venues in Bushwick to noiseniks like Emeralds’ Mark McGuire. A year later his music appeared on I Am The Center, the Light in the Attic compilation that kicked off the new age revival in earnest. The Celestial Soul Portrait compilation on Numero Group is a solid survey of his work; featuring a sepia slice-of-life photo on the cover rather than the garish temples-and-rainbows imagery Iasos himself loved, it endears itself to listeners like those in the Bushwick crowd: crate-diggers and musical omnivores who may have no investment in new age concepts beyond their appreciation for the music.
New age, once anathema for anyone who considered themselves a savvy music fan, has come thoroughly back around. It’s hard to begrudge people for turning to music with a focus on positivity and healing in a time when the world looks like it’s ending. Speaking from his idyllic deck in Marin, Iasos spoke of a “cosmic push,” an imminent age of human spiritual and artistic growth brought on by beings like Vista. It seems harder than ever to imagine humanity discovering a collective selfless good—something that would allow the reversal of climate change, perhaps, and keep the lush California landscape around him from catching fire. Yet Iasos insisted throughout his life that such a transformative event was right around the corner. The songs on Inter-Dimensional Music sparkle with the promise of this new world, however distant.
