Iasos: Inter-Dimensional Music Album Evaluation

Iasos loves slide guitar, which permits him to create unimaginable sweeps and mild flutters. The flute, instrument of his childhood, dances freely, conjuring pictures of satyrs wreathed in laurels. (Vista shouldn’t be the one god Iasos has labored with; he claims to have acquired a musical scale from Pan.) The piano doesn’t sound actual in any respect—it’s pearly, warped, barely too lustrous, a reminiscence of a piano. All these parts mix on “Lueena Coast,” the album’s most gorgeous monitor, which opens with scattered piano arpeggios and leaps into grand pirouettes of flute. Iasos’ voice could be faintly heard within the background, mouthing syllables by way of a thick sheet of reverb.

Avian whoops and titters abound within the margins of Inter-Dimensional Music, making express Iasos’ debut to Martin Denny’s exotica data of the Fifties, which used birdsong to place American listeners within the thoughts of some faraway tropical isle. “Lanua Cove,” out there solely on the unique vinyl urgent, facilities a conspicuously Denny-like vibraphone; although a distant, aqueous cymbal provides it some curiosity, it’s simpler to think about tiki bars than transcendence whereas listening.

“Osiris Bull-Man & Elephant Stroll,” a cartoonish approximation of “Historical Egyptian” music, is the monitor that’s aged the worst. Iasos’ declare that these pseudo-Arabic scales implied a reference to the age of the pharaohs made clear his music was not proof against the infantilizing streak of exoticism that persists in new age, rooted in the concept non-Western cultures and spiritualities are extra in contact with some elementary fact in regards to the universe. It’s solely because of the soupy combine and manufacturing grit that “Osiris” really manages to sound a bit historical, weathered by time and mud; as soon as the ersatz Japanese melodies fade out, it meanders its manner right into a surprisingly sturdy psych-rock groove that’s the one audible occasion of Iasos’ affect from Hendrix.

Inter-Dimensional Music doesn’t ever actually sound like divine music. It appears like a human’s approximation of divine music utilizing the restricted instruments at their disposal. That’s what makes it undeniably tacky at occasions, and in addition what makes it work. It’s a wierd factor to say about music so outwardly languid, nevertheless it additionally feels pressing, as if this particular person was doing their damnedest to transcribe the cosmic music of their thoughts earlier than it flickered out. The influences from the likes of Debussy and Denny, then, may very well be interpreted as Iasos’ manner of filling within the gaps. Even his chintzy imitations of nature, just like the water sounds on “The Bubble Therapeutic massage” or the canned birdsong results everywhere in the album, have a hyperreal high quality that’s spookier and extra alluring than a pristine discipline recording would’ve been.