Mort Garson - Mother Earth's Plantasia (CD)
- Plantasia
- Symphony for a Spider Plant
- Baby's Tears Blues
- Ode to An African Violet
- Concerto for Philodendron ; Pothos
- Rhapsody in Green
- Swingin' Spathiphyllums
- You Don't Have to Walk a Begonia
- A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair
- Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant
- Format
- Vinyl LP
- Genre
- Electronic
- Tracks
- 10
- Pressing
- Colored Vinyl
- Edition
- Anniversary Edition
Before Brian Eno popularized discreet music, Juilliard-educated composer and session player Mort Garson was already crafting lush, curious sound worlds, from lounge hits and the 1969 moon-landing broadcast to arrangements for Doris Day and Glen Campbell; by the mid-1970s, as The Secret Life of Plants turned specious claims about plant consciousness, telepathy, and musical preference into a nationwide craze, houseplants filled American homes and Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia arrived as the perfect soundtrack: "warm earth music for plants... and the people that love them," performed on the new-fangled Moog with bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly whimsy. Originally distributed through plant shops and even mattress purchases, the album seemed like a strange artifact of 1970s plant mania, but decades later it blossomed into a cult classic, with Sacred Bones' 2019 reissue introducing it to a wider global audience and helping transform it into a streaming-era touchstone. Now, 50 years after it's original release, Mother Earth's Plantasia stands as an enduring reminder of Garson's singular gift for making the synthetic feel strangely alive and the whimsical feel oddly profound.
- Plantasia
- Symphony for a Spider Plant
- Baby's Tears Blues
- Ode to An African Violet
- Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos
- Rhapsody in Green
- Swingin' Spathiphyllums
- You Don't Have to Walk a Begonia
- A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair
- Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant
- Format
- CD
- Genre
- Electronic
- Tracks
- 10
If 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) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. 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. 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 and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell's ""By the Time I Get to Phoenix."" 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. ""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. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes. This release marks the first official re-issue of the long sought-a er cult classic. Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him.""My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,"" Darmet says of Plantasia's new renaissance. ""He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then."" Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he's not really noticed, just like a houseplant.
