Vice.com has an excellent interview with Iasos about his long career. We also get to hear about his most recent projects. It goes like this:
As it happens, I spend the entire day before my interview with Iasos, the psychedelic musician and artist who invented the New Age genre, crying. Without going into details (don’t want to reveal too much from my upcoming memoir Sad Diary 2k14), at 7 p.m. on the day he performs at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right, I am laying sideways on a sofa, considering the many wrongs that have been done against me by this cruel, cruel world, and wondering if I should just skip the whole night, slide into a pair of boxer shorts and order in.
Then I remember vibes. I don’t want any bad ones, and I’ve already been texting with him:
“Cool, so I’ll see you tomorrow at 7:30 x E”
“I’m curious, what do the letters X E mean?”
Plus how many times do you get to meet a man whose career has spanned 44 years, who came up with an entire genre, and who writes his music with the help of a heavenly being who lives in another dimension?
Hardly any.
Like a trouper, I head to the venue.
Born in Greece but raised in Upstate New York, Iasos is a prolific composer and visual artist, whose work has been studied by scientists researching near-death experiences, and acquired by NASA for its healing qualities. In 1967, while studying at Cornell University, he began hearing music in his head, and on graduation in 1968, he moved to Berkeley, California and began experimenting with the types of sounds and compositions that we know recognize as New Age. His albums tend to have a practical lean—over the years his output has included healing and meditation albums and music for advanced love-making—but not strictly so. Other albums are more playful: synthesized jungle sounds from distant planet, an upbeat tropical album called Bora Bora 2000.
Read it here.