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| REVIEWS: New Age Music 2 by Annalisa and Giampiero Cara This month, we dedicate our reviews page to a New Age music pioneer, Iasos. We've also interviewed him, and you can read the interview by just clicking here. This is an extended version of a New Age music masterpiece of the Eighties, which made the famous Zen philosopher and author Alan Watts say "Iasos is doing the classical music of the New Age." Also, the Psychology Department at Plymouth State College conducted a survey from which this album resulted as the "most similar to the heavenly music heard by people who had undergone a near death experience." So, there isn't much more we can say about Angelic Music, beside noticing that, as it happens with the best classical music, it hasn't lost its freshness over the years. It still sounds as New Age Music Avant-garde, and can be used as effectively as ever to create an ideal musical space for meditation, visualization or simple relaxation, or even for "tuning into angels", as Iasos suggests in a fascinating article entitled "Five Tips for Tuning into Angels" that accompanies the album. | In Association with
Iasos Angelic Music Inter-Dimensional Music
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| Since its early pioneering days as one of the very first New Age musicians, Iasos has always loved experimenting with sounds in innovative ways. And this tendency seems more present than ever in his latest project, which is not a simple music CD, but "A Tool-box of Sounds to Tune-Up Your Energy Fields." In fact, the tracks it contains are not exactly musical pieces, but "audio tools" created by Iasos (who received them inwardly, as all his music, from a light being named Vista) to enhance physical, emotional and mental well-being. Of course, you have to listen to this CD and experiment with it to measure its relaxing, healing and maybe even ascensional effects on you, but what can be perceived immediately is the powerful and absorbing nature of its sounds -- which are created starting both from natural and "inner" sounds -- as well as the uniqueness of the overall project. To guide you in this revolutionary listening experience, Iasos -- who has very interesting things to say also from a theoretical standpoint, as you can see by reading his essay on "Sound as Healing Light Waves" here - has written a very useful and detailed booklet that accompanies the CD, explaining, among other things, the intended effects of each track and its optimum reception posture. Highly recommended. | Iasos Sacred Sonic Tools IDM
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| Another CD which shows Iasos' tendency to be original and courageous in exploring new artistic territories. Here -- in contrast with the kind of intense meditative music one would expect from him -- Iasos experiments with highly rhythmical tracks. The musical results he achieves here may not always match the quality of his masterpieces, but are nevertheless commendable for their originality and for their ability to make the listener "feel good," which is the album's main purpose anyway. In the interesting and detailed notes he writes here to help the listener to assimilate the music better, Iasos explains that he calls it Tiki Rock. It is a kind of "tropical dance music that is happy, high-energy, and flavored with the South Pacific," with incessant rhythms from Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and Polynesia, but also, as the composer himself emphasizes, "rhythms that are not native to any part of this world!". But however enjoyable and original the six rhythmic tracks in this album can be, Iasos appears at his best in the four "relaxed musical sketches of the tropics" that counterbalance them. After dancing to the high-energy rhythms of tracks like the opening "Fire Dance" or the sensuous and hypnotic "Bamboo Grove Samba", you will appreciate the soothing and serene but still colorful atmospheres of "Tahiti Sunset", "Ulura Lagoon", "Soft Beach" and "Night Wind". | Iasos Bora Bora 2000 IDM
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| Beside being the title of this CD, Timeless Sound can also be an apt definition for Iasos' best pieces. And two of them are presented here together: one is a new piece and another is an extended version of a track from another Iasos' classic, Inter-Dimensional Music, but no-one would ever notice that they come from different decades. And that's not easy, especially with electronic music, where the continuous and extremely fast technical progress usually makes older tracks easy to recognize. As is usually the case with Iasos' music, both tracks are extremely relaxing, and designed specifically for extended states of deep meditation, but also for yoga, bodywork, Reiki and other forms of healing through energy. The concept of this album, in particular -- as explained effectively by Iasos in the liner notes -- is that music can help quiet our emotions so that, as in a shallow pond whose surface waves are calm and not turbulent we can easily see the rocks on the bottom, it becomes much easier for us to receive messages from our inner being. | Iasos Timeless Sound IDM
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| Recorded at the beginning of the Nineties in "3-D Stereo", a technique that allows the listener to generate a "musical hologram" in his mind (especially while wearing stereo headphones), this album is one of the musically richer in Iasos' production. This means that it not only serves the purpose of creating a musical atmosphere capable of inducing deep states of relaxation, as most Iasos' titles do, but also lends itself to a simple and more careful listening experience, which is needed to perceive all the subtle nuances of this music and the many references it makes to other kinds of music (even to the progressive rock of the Seventies, in certain moments). Anyway, it also reflects the conscious intentions of its composer, who offers it "as a vibrational gateway to the celestial realms of Light [...] The music is your 'channel tuner' and the beam of your attention is your actual electronic 'bridge' for connecting in consciousness to these realms." To help this connection, Iasos also suggests, for every track, an affirmation to pronounce while you are listening to the music in a meditative state. | Iasos Elixir IDM
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