MOTHER EARTHS PLANTASIA [VINYL]

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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. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.” Martoccio, Angie (2019-12-12). "Revisiting the Weird World of Seventies Plant Music". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 2021-05-18 . Retrieved 2021-05-18. The music on it was composed specifically for plants to listen to. [6] Garson was inspired by his wife, who grew many plants in their home. [7] Garson used a Moog synthesizer to compose the album, the first album on the West Coast composed entirely on the Moog synthesizer. [7] Electronic music is not normally a genre that hugely peaks my interest, but when I read that this album was made specifically for plants to listen to? Now THAT interested me. What do plants like to listen to? What did Mort Garson think classified as ‘music for plants’? As it turns out, the result is rather beautiful. But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.

The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself. My father was all about the music. On his grave, it says, ‘Let the music play on.’ I think it's fair to say the music is playing on, and part of his legacy is still here and living” – Day Darmet, Mort Garson’s daughter

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My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes. Plantasia Audiophile Edition is a 2xLP pressed at 45rpm from a deluxe remastering of the original master tapes.** But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: "When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn't want to do pop music anymore." Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society's West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. "My mom had a lot of plants," Darmet says. "She didn't believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible." And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes. Not long after “Our Day Will Come” topped the charts, the Garson family headed west. In Los Angeles, Garson spent the mid-60s working with a who’s who of easy-listening pop stars from the era, including Doris Day and Glen Campbell, until one fateful day in 1967, he attended the Audio Engineering Society's West Coast convention. There, he met the man who invented the Moog modular synthesiser, Robert Moog. Darmet compares her father’s encounter with Moog to the moment French Nouveau Réalisme painter and performance artist Yves Klein made the colour that would become known as ‘ International Klein Blue’ the singular focus of his Blue Epoch. It was an instrument that he totally resonated with. “He got to a certain point and was like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to do what I want’,” says Darmet. “Once he got the Moog and put it in his studio at home, he was there all the time. He was 100 per cent stimulated, and he needed to keep going with this until he couldn’t.” Mother Earth's Plantasia (subtitled " warm earth music for plants and the people who love them"), commonly referred to as simply Plantasia, is an electronic album by Mort Garson first released in 1976.

Appel recognizes and appreciates the creativity of plant-based music. While she notes that all the emotional work is one-sided, that doesn't mean the plants won't be rewarded from this attention. "Forming connections with plants or any other kind of living thing is very beneficial to humans. Creating that atmosphere that makes the human more relaxed, creative, productive — all the things that we know music can do for us — is great," she says. "[And] if we connect with other organisms, we take care of them better. So they may even grow better — not because of music, but because of our sense of connection to them." Music Direct reserves the right to change the terms of this promotion or discontinue this offer at any time. Plantasia arrived three years after the release of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's book The Secret Life of Plants, which appeared on The New York Times' bestselling nonfiction list amongst titles like The Joy of Sex and How to Be Your Own Best Friend. In The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins and Bird recounted experiments conducted around the planet that supposedly proved that plants were far more complex and cosmically attuned beings than most humans imagined. One of its central claims was that the health and productivity of plants could be affected not only by playing music for them, but by what kind of music you played for them. In March 2019, Sacred Bones Records announced that they were officially reissuing Mother Earth's Plantasia. [8] The reissue is available on music streaming services and was released on vinyl, CD and cassette as well on June 21, 2019. [6] Angie Martoccio, writing for Rolling Stone in 2019, described Mother Earth's Plantasia as Garson's magnum opus. [10] Stephen M. Deusner, writing for Pitchfork, described it as perhaps Garson's "most beloved album, at least among crate-diggers and record collectors." [4] Music Direct reserves the right to select the carrier and ship method within the terms of this offer.But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. Among the numerous off-the-wall claims Tompkins and Bird made in The Secret Life of Plants, their suggestion that plants loved music proved surprisingly enduring. Music, they wrote, had the capacity to help plants grow rapidly and beautifully, if administered correctly. But before their owners were playing them Stevie Wonder’s new age meditations on plants and their secrets, there was another record that was hip with West Hollywood’s leaf lovers.