The musician and visionary, a founder of the genre, died Saturday.

The best path for understanding the music and philosophies of the artist known as Iasos is to hear him discuss the foundation of his ideas. The artist, born TK, died on Saturday.

“Around ’67 or ’68, I just started hearing it in my head,” Iasos says of his aesthetic in the 30-minute VHS documentary below, which was released by his label Inter-Dimensional Music. “I didn’t know where it was coming from. It was like a radio station inside. I’d be running around listening to it and loving it.”

A half-decade later, he heard more sonic missives, this time from “a particular being from a higher dimension, and I knew in that instant that he was one that all this time had been purposely – mind to mind – transmitting into my mind. I also remembered him from before I was born.” Acknowledging the strangeness of his experiences, Iasos concluded: “At least I’m telling you what I believe, and you’re free to handle that reality any way you like.”

On Monday, Douglas Mcgowan, whose work amplifying New Age music over the past decade singlehandedly renewed interest in the genre, posted news of his passing. Mcgowen, who’s the founder of Yoga Records and does West Coast A&R for the Numero Group, wrote:

Along with Steven Halpern, Iasos basically invented new age music. This bears repeating — he created a genre of music. He created the part where there are no rules. He invented a style of music and then mastered it over and over. He set the bar so high from the very beginning no one even tried to match what he did with Inter-Dimensional Music (1975). It’s one of the most psychedelic, original works of music ever made.

By injecting West Coast mysticism and inter dimensional travel into the gestalt of his art, Iasos also helped define New Age music, for better and worse, for the larger culture. His outre belief system provided the nascent genre with fodder for ridicule; dismissive music critics writing about punk, disco and proto-rap had no time for New Age, which coupled minimalism, synthesizers, fleeting rhythms and structure-free spaciousness with woo-woo ideas on inter dimensional travel.

In a 1979 interview with Steve Hill of the influential show Hearts of Space, Iasos described “my sound alchemy notebook, which is just a compilation of the advanced musical concepts I’ve been receiving from [his muse] Vista. The delightful thing is that many years ago when I had the concepts, I thought, this is great but I can’t use it because I don’t have the equipment – it’s so expensive. But now I’m gradually getting the equipment piece by piece. and of course, the more equipment I can get, the more of those concepts I can use.”

Ironically, Iasos’ movement was way more revolutionary and transgressive than punk. According to his website, Iasos’ final live performance was on Oct. 28, when he performed a full multi-media concert at Romantso in Athens, Greece. The event, he noted, was “on a Taurus Full Moon, with Lunar Eclipse.”

Read more about Iasos on his wonderfully rudimentary website.