Mort Garson – 7th Level Music

Mort Garson’s “Mother Earth’s Plantasia” album gets 50th anniversary re-release and parties.

Today we’re excited to announce the 50th anniversary celebration of Mort Garson’s beloved cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, with Sacred Bones presenting the first-ever authorised eco-friendly reissue of the highly sought-after record. Originally released in 1976, the record was created for the listening attention of house plants and was one of the first ever to use a Moog. It’s available digitally now with the anniversary edition set for physical release on Sept 4th.

Listen / Pre-order here: https://mortgarson.lnk.to/Plantasia

To coincide with the anniversary Sacred Bones have also announced two very special Plantasia events in Chicago and Kingston, NY.

The long-running celebration of ambient and electronic music returns at Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago on September 10th and 11th, taking place over two beautiful days at the end of summer across the entire conservatory nature campus, including a new expanded outdoor stage. Brought to you by Sacred Bones, Empty Bottle Presents and Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, this year’s event features Helado Negro & Reyna Tropical, james k, Makaya McCraven, Flore Laurentine, and many more unmissable acts.

Tickets here: https://www.ticketweb.com/event/plantasia-two-day-pass-garfield-park-conservatory-tickets/14942083

At Seed Song Farm in Kingston, NY on September 19th and 20th Sacred Bones will celebrate for a weekend of music, botanical arts and crafts, workshops, a curated market, plant sales, alongside performances by Gigi Masin, SPELLLING, Mary Lattimore, Green-House, Alabaster DePlume and more. This event is on sale now, grab your ticket while they last.

Tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-howl-sacred-bones-present-plantasia-tickets-1990147578982

Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Mort Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix.

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the book shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon.

Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.

Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson. Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result.

The album gained an enormous cult following decades after its release. Sacred Bones’ 2019 reissue helped introduce Plantasia to a wider global audience, sparking a remarkable second life for Garson’s unlikely masterpiece. What was once a strange artifact of 1970s plant-mania has become a beloved evergreen, rediscovered and re-embraced by a new generation of listeners and flourishing far beyond its original moment.

Now, 50 years after its original release, Mother Earth’s Plantasia marks a major anniversary moment. To honor Mother Earth, Sacred Bones is releasing the first authorised eco-friendly reissue of Plantasia, pressed on 100% recycled eco-green vinyl and printed on 100% recycled paper. It is housed in a 100% recycled jacket, wrapped in bio-based shrinkwrap, and includes the original Mother Earth’s Indoor Plant Care Booklet alongside a digital download presented on a real seed-paper card.

Half a century on, Plantasia continues to resonate – an enduring reminder of Mort Garson’s ability to make the synthetic feel strangely alive and the whimsical feel oddly profound.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Frankie at Stereo Sanctity.]

Review: Mort Garson – Journey to the Moon and Beyond (2023 reissue)

I first heard of Mort Garson on an Amoeba Music “What’s in My Bag?” YouTube video featuring members of The New Pornographers. In it, bassist John Collins mentioned how bandmate Neko Case introduced him to Garson – a fellow Canadian who made weird electro music for television, films, and plants. Collins describes him as “a real studio cat.”

That studio cat’s albums are being reissued by Sacred Bones, and one of them is Journey to the Moon and Beyond – a collection of TV ad themes, film themes, and, yes, music he made to be broadcast during the 1970 moon landing. It’s a wild collection of electro oddities and fascinations.

“Zoos of the World” starts us off with an immediate drop into a world of 1970s electronic wonder. It sounds and feels like something you’d hear on a Disneyworld ride that’s long since closed and been turned into an overpriced restaurant. “The Big Game Hunters (See the Cheetah)” mixes Esquivel-like jazz (and sexy feminine vocals) with psychedelic synths and slick beats. “Western Dragon” comes in three parts: One a brief outro (part 3), one with a wild guitar solo (part 2), and one a cool meditative track (part 1).

The album’s centerpiece is “Moon Journey,” which simulates the sounds of space capsules closing, rockets launching, heroes being heroic, navigational systems bleeping and chirping, retro-rockets firing, and the strangeness of being in low gravity. There are three tracks titled “Music for Advertising” (numbers 6 through 8). Number 6 has a little bit of a bossa nova feel to it, number 7 is luxurious and thrilling, and number 8 is bold, adventurous, and robotic.

The inclusion of the main theme and end credits to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye is pure gold, as is “Captain DJ (Disco UFO Part II)” – a groovy, sparkling disco dance track with Saturday morning cartoon lyrics and vocals (“Disco U-F-Oh-Oh-Oh! The faster you spin, the further you go!”). “Three TV IDs” is a collage of three TV jingles for cool stations you saw as a kid and then never again because they were bought out by some corporate monstrosity.

“Love Is a Garden” could be a follow-up to his entire Plantasia album (an electro record made for playing to your plants), as it’s soothing and almost an 8-bit version of floating down a jungle stream. “The D-Bee’s Cat Boogie” is a wonky, wild trip, and the album closes with the Black Eye end credits and its sexy, smoky vocals atop Garson’s slick arrangements (check out that 1970s jazz flute!).

This is a super cool record, and one of the best reissues I’ve heard in a long while, let alone one of the most fun electro records I’ve heard in a couple years. God bless Sacred Bones for putting Garson’s stuff back out there for people like me to discover.

Keep your mind open.

[Journey to the subscription box while you’re here.]

[Thanks to Alex at Terrorbird Media!]

Mort Garson takes us to “Zoos of the World” from an upcoming release of some of his classical material.

A master of playful sonic whimsy, electronic pioneer Mort Garson spent a lifetime quietly pushing the boundaries of synthesis. The latest track to his name, “Zoos of The World,” is baroque and unpredictable. Centered on warm keyboard patches that come together to replicate the tonalities of a retro-futuristic orchestra, the springy cut was taken from a 1970 National Geographic special. The track follows “Moon Journey,”the soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. Nearly in tandem with the release date, July 20th will mark Garson’s 99th birthday, and the anniversary of the moon landing. Both taken from the forthcoming archival release Journey to the Moon and Beyond, out July 21 via Sacred Bones.

Journey to the Moon and Beyond advanced listening parties have been announced at the following locations for July 20, 2023:

Amoeba, San Francisco, US

Balades Sonores, Paris, FR

End Of An Ear, Austin, US

Family Store, Brighton, UK

Monorail, Glasgow, UK

Newbury Comics, Boston, US

Rough Trade, New York, US

Seasick Records, Birmingham, US

Stranger Than Paradise, London, UK

It’s hard not to use plant terminology when discussing the long, strange career –and subsequent renaissance– of Mort Garson. Like a seed buried deep and left to germinate for months (or in this instance, decades), his great body of work was scattered in record bins and tape closets and all but forgotten in pop culture. A classically trained musician and electronic researcher with a tireless work ethos that led to nearly over a thousand writing and arranging credits, Mort Garson’s music got buried in the topsoil of time.

When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more. (And naturally, just playing the vinyl reissue of Plantasia at home made every single plant in your house thrive.)
Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom. Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man’s sound. There’s the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson), some previously unreleased and newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is “Zoos of the World,” where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, slumbering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name. The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like “Western Dragon,” but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information.

The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson’s soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive. So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort’s many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.

Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world –in small daily things, popular trends, and big historical events– with our tweets, posts, reaction videos, and the like. In that way, Garson lived such history and then added his own little spin on things.

Keep your mind open.

[Don’t forget to subscribe before you blast off.]

[Thanks to Alex and Andi at Terrorbird Media.]