Iasos, the Greek-American musician widely regarded as one of the pioneers of new age music, has died. Douglas Mcgowan of Numero Group, the label behind the 2013 compilation Celestial Soul Portrait, confirmed the news on Instagram. Iasos was 77.
Iasos and his family moved from Greece to the US when he was four, initially settling in Malone, New York. He began piano lessons at age eight and soon took up the flute, which he played in his high school band. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in cultural anthropology in 1968, Iasos moved to California to pursue music. He began working on what he called “paradise music,” or inter-dimensional music, which he would hear in his mind.
“At a certain point in my life at Cornell I started hearing paradise music in my head, and then later I had an experience where I suddenly became aware of a higher dimensional being, and it ignited an aha moment,” Iasos said in 2014 interview. “I realised he and I had made an agreement together before I was born, and the agreement was that he was going to transmit music to me, and his visual ideas also, and my job was to receive them, manifest them, and get them out there to the public. The point of them wasn’t money or fame, it was to create music and visuals that will help people raise their vibrations, to go through the planetary upshift that our planet is going through anyway.”
Iasos released his first album, Inter-Dimensional Music, in 1975. That same year, he played electric flute on his friend and fellow musician Steven Halpern’s debut, Spectrum Suite. He issued 20 studio albums across his career, and his most recent piece, ‘The Garden of Salathooslia’, came out in September. Iasos’ music has been used by NASA, Lazaris, Encyclopedia Britannica, Laserium, and Hewlett Packard. A documentary about his work was released in 1979.
“Along with Steven Halpern, Iasos basically invented new age music,” Mcgowan’s message read. “This bears repeating – he created a genre of music … So many things he created were simply without comparison. He invented new tools to create new forms. He built incredible, immortal things from scratch.”
Carlos Niño, Iasos’ producer and friend, wrote: “Our Dearest Brother, Friend, Guide, Mentor, Inspiration, and Great Visionary of Celestial Paradise Music has transitioned from his Earth Body today, Saturday, January 6, 2024. We invite you to please explore the vastness of Iasos. He poured his heart and soul into his Music and fully intended for it to raise vibrations on Earth, that we all would live in higher harmonic realization of our unique potential, co-existing and co-creating together.”
