Altered Zones

By Michael P. Mcgregor

In 1965, the story goes, a young cultural anthropology student by the name of Iasos spontaneously began hearing "heavenly" sounds in his head; he called this music "paradise music," finished up his degree at Cornell, and moved to California with the mission of recreating this sound with a combination of electronic effects and acoustic instruments like piano and flute. In 1975, he released his debut album, Inter-Dimensional Music Through Iasos; alongside the seminal Spectrum Suite LP by close friend and collaborator Steve Halpern, which came out the same year, Inter-Dimensional Music remains one of the foundational releases of the New Age genre. Since then, Iasos has released some 30 cassettes and LPS of his ecstastic, ambient soundscapes, and has helped shaped the aesthetics of New Age with his luminous video art.

When it came time to interview Iasos for The Report V.II, I was intimidated as hell. Lucky for me, all anxiety melted away the moment the Greek-born, Sausalito resident picked up the phone. "How long would you like to me to speak for?" he asked, admitting that he can "be quite wordy." "Go for it," I replied. And he did. The conversation that ensued, which is about 10 pages too long to print here, isn't so much an interview as me throwing a few subjects into the air and letting Iasos wax on topics like Paradise Music, his creative inspiration from muses Vista and Pan, and his experiences building his own instruments. In the following excerpt, Iasos discusses his initial dislike of synthesizers, his visual art, and the transformative potential of sound.

The Report: You mentioned before that you stared making music before synthesizers were available.

Iasos: Before synthesizers, I was doing electronic processing of acoustic instruments. For example, you might put a microphone on a flute, hooked up to an echoplex. Or a microphone on a piano, and do something that gives it a vibrato. I was just fooling around with all kinds of stuff. It was guided experimentation, because when Vista would send me a new music idea, it would come in a flash, and I’d get three things simultaneously: number one, the music, which means melody and chords; number two, technical know-how, or how to create the sounds necessary to manifest a piece. Thirdly, he’d give me the effect that this piece of music would have on people when they listened to it. He’s always been 100% accurate about how it’s going to affect people. So I’d get all of that in the same flash from Vista.

The Report: How did you get into building your own instruments?

Iasos: When synthesizers first came out, I didn’t like them. I didn’t use them because they sounded way too cold and sterile to me. What it comes down to was this: if you pluck a guitar string and analyze it, you’ll see that the wave shape is slightly different in each cycle, whereas a synthesizer will be exactly the same wave shape each cycle. As it turns out, if it’s suddenly changing and not exactly the same wave length each cycle, the brain interprets that as sounding organic and rich and acoustic. Whereas, if it’s exactly the same, the brain interprets it as sounding cold, sterile, and mechanical. And so in the beginning, I wasn’t interested in synthesizers because of their coldness. Eventually, they evolved enough to be able to sound organic; that’s when it became interesting and I started using them.

Nowadays, each synthesizer can create so many different sounds that it’s really a whole galaxy of sounds, a whole universe of sounds. The amazing thing is that when you’re traversing the infinite realm of sound possibilities for any particular synthesizer, once in a while you’ll stumble upon a sound that, BOOM, triggers past life recall or something. It’s fascinating when that happens, because it’ll open a whole other realm, a whole experience, a whole memory of another realm, and then you play with that. Whenever I came across a sound that resonated with me, I’d fool around with it and explore it. But that’s pretty much what anybody who messes around with synthesizers does. But Vista would give me ideas. I have complicated charts that allow me to control the output of the synthesizers through this effect and that effect-- all sorts of complicated recipes that Vista would give me to achieve the sounds I was hearing in my head.

The Report: When did you start doing video art?

Iasos: I had always been doing multimedia concerts from the beginning. First, it was slide projectors, then slide projectors with a dissolve unit. Later, they got more sophisticated, and I had a programmable dissolve unit controlling two slide projectors, and then a more sophisticated one where I had two kaleidoscope projectors-- each of which was an automatic dimmer, so I could fade in and out. So I was doing all that stuff when I was performing live; visuals were always a part of my music, even as early as 1970. But in 1980, some people said to me, “Iasos, we like what you’re doing with your multimedia concerts. We have a professional video facility. If you’d like to create a video, we’d like to give you access to this facility for free.” They were normally renting the place for $200 to $300 an hour, but they gave me a key to the place, and I could go in there whenever they weren’t renting it and work on my own video.” When that happened, my guidance from Vista said, “Stop everything else. Put all your energy into this. Get as much done as fast as you can.” So I stopped recording new music and put all my energy into making this video as fast as I could. The people who taught me how to use the software were surprised; they had never seen anyone pick it up and use it as fast as I did, and they had never seen anyone using it as creatively. For example, in those days they had switches with wipes and modulated wipes. I started using the modulated wipes by themselves, and they would say, “No, no, no. This is for transitioning from one effect to another.” And I said, “Yeah, but look what it can do by itself!” [Laughts]. So I worked on it for half a year. I had half an hour of material and that became my video Crystal Vista, which I believe is one of the two videos that started New Age Music-- the other one being Beauty, which included some of my music in it.

More recently, in January of 2010, I released Realms of Light [DVD], which is light-years ahead of Crystal Vista, because instead of doing it with A/B rolling tapes, nowadays it’s software and it’s much more sophisticated. It retains the same spirit even though the technology is so far advanced.

The Report: Would you say your aim is to induce higher consciousness through sound?

Iasos: You’ve heard the phrase “as above, so below.” That means resonance can occur between octaves. Simple resonance occurs if you tune two strings on a guitar to the same note, and you pluck one string, and the other starts vibrating. You can also get resonance between octaves: if you have a guitar tuned to a note, and then another string on that guitar tuned to the same note, but one octave higher, like la–LA, which means exactly twice the frequency. You can also get resonance that way, so if you pluck either one, the other will start vibrating. If you pluck the lower octave, the higher octave will start vibrating, and vice-versa. So, resonance also occurs between octaves. Well, the interesting thing is resonance occurs between innumerable octaves. Now sound is vibrating relatively slowly, between 60 times a second to 20 thousand times a second. Light that you can see with your eyes is about 40 octaves higher, and that’s going from 390 trillion times a second to 750 trillion times a second. That’s the visible light that the human eye can see. Well, it just keeps going up and up and up. In the higher realms, you get into the range of emotions and then into the range of consciousness. Well, because of resonance between octaves, sound can induce great emotional states and particular states of consciousness.

Now, here’s yet another aspect. As everyone obviously knows, sound influences emotions, which is why music is popular. Music is popular because it provides certain feelings, certain emotions. Well, the interesting thing is, if a musician is in a particular emotional state, and he creates music, his emotional state is embedded within that music. If a person listens to it, that emotion is within one’s personal emotional range, and they can start to feel that emotion. Sometimes they don’t get anything from it at all. For example, I have some music that is very high octave ecstasy, and people whose emotional range can’t resonate with that think is no feeling in the music at all, whereas others say, "It’s so ecstatic, I love it! So, if it’s within their range, it’ll get them resonating to it; if it’s not, it won’t. So sound, or music, can be an emotional transfer from the creator to the listener. If I’m in an exalted state, and I create music from that state, and the person who listens to it is capable of feeling exalted feelings, then BOOM!-- the music triggers that within them.

The third way is consciousness transfer. If I’m in a particular state of consciousness, and I create music from that state, those listening to it will resonate with that consciousness if they are capable of doing so. The fourth way is through intention. Intention can ride on top of sound; it can be embedded within it. So, if anyone creates music and they intend for that music to heal, if they want it to resonate a person into a higher state of consciousness, or if they have the intention that this music will help people connect with their own higher selves, then people tend to feel that intention when they listen to that music.

Now, on a side note, musicians are really merchants who are serving emotions on a platter of sound. So, musicians specialize in different emotions. For example, if you want to generate hate and anger, those are the heavy metal people. They are emotional specialists in the states of hate and anger. In my case, my specialty is ecstatic feeling. It’s not as popular as other ones. Middle-of-the-road emotions get a lot more popularity. It’s a bell-shaped curve of emotions, and if you’re in the middle range-- like Christina Aguilera or Cher or Michael Jackson-- there are a lot of people who want to feel those emotions and you can have a huge following if you’re good at it. If you are a weirdo like me, and you lie at either end of the spectrum, there aren’t a lot of people who can relate to that emotion, but those who do love it a lot.

The Report: Why do you think the middle ranges are so drawing to so many people?

Iasos: Well, you know how in statistics they talk about the bell-shaped curve. It’s the same with emotions. Each emotion vibrates on a particular frequency. Negative emotions vibrate at a slower frequency and positive emotions vibrate at a higher frequency. Emotions occur in octaves also. For example, if you’re feeling good, you can mark that as an octave. If you’re happy, you can mark that as an octave higher. Joy, an octave higher. Ecstasy, an octave higher. Rapture, an octave higher. If you go a few octaves higher, then you’re in the range where angels cruise, although humans don’t often go there. One of the functions of my music is to familiarize people with the higher octave versions of emotions they already know. So instead of love, a higher octave version of love would be like intense cosmic, universal, unconditional love.

Now with respect to your question, you would expect to get a bell-shaped curve for the emotions people resonate to because it’s just a statistical average. For any given planet, there will be a different bell-shaped curve with a different middle point. Well, on Earth it’s what’s called pop music. It’s called pop because it’s at the middle of the bell-shaped curve for planet Earth.

Read the full interview in The Report V.II. Visit Iasos' website for music, visuals, and spiritual advice.