MORT GARSON – Mother Earth's Plantasia - LP - Green Vinyl

1LP - Limited Edition Green Vinyl, Includes The Original Mother Earth's Indoor Plant Care Booklet & Digital Download On Real Seed-paper Card. Plant It And Watch It Sprout!

Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making discreet music. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon landing with 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 itself in our minds, our homes, and 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. Written by 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 could hear our prayers, act as lie detectors, communicate telepathically, predict natural disasters, and even receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants. Perhaps the wildest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or whatever 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 to 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 could be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes—perhaps explaining why he has been so unheralded as a result.

Tracklist: 

A1        Plantasia
A2        Symphony For A Spider Plant
A3        Baby's Tears Blues
A4        Ode To An African Violet
A5        Concerto For Philodendron & Pothos

B1        Rhapsody In Green
B2        Swingin' Spathiphyllums
B3        You Don't Have To Walk A Begonia
B4        A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair
B5        Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant