MOTHER EARTHS PLANTASIA [VINYL]

Product Information

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] Darmet lives in San Francisco, the city where Garson spent his final years, where she runs the boutique Day Darmet Catering company with her business partner, Florence Raynaud. When I call, she’s happy to discuss her father, but admits she’d previously spent years ignoring phone calls and throwing letters about his music from advertising and movie companies in the bin. It was Braaten’s approach and energy that led her to trust him with her father’s music. “Otherwise, it would have just been sitting in a box in the basement,” she says. “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.”

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. 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. THE FIRST AUTHORIZED REISSUE OF MORT GARSON'S LEGENDARY 1976 ALBUM OF MOOG MUSIC FOR PLANTS. INCLUDES THE ORIGINAL MOTHER EARTH'S INDOOR PLANT CARE BOOKLET 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.

Release

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. 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.

Earlier this week, Brooklyn-based DJ Max Ravitz, performing under his best-known alias Patricia, performed an intimate set to a poncho-clad crowd in a small pavilion in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Steady rain merged hypnotically with the logarithmic wailing and white noise emanating from Ravitz’s Moog System 55, the hulking analog maze bathed in the soft spotlight of a plant lamp. It felt a bit like a cult gathering; graphic designers and wizened hippies on a journey towards spiritual enlightenment, or at least sharing a moment of quiet ecstasy before going their separate ways. Such is the power of Mort Garson’s 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia, “warm earth music for plants and the people who love them,” which was celebrated at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by Atlas Obscura and Sacred Bones—along with Patricia, an interactive installation of “Sonic Succulents,” and a Plantasia listening experience of “Phytophillic Technology in the Psychedelic Era.” By the late 50s, Garson had worked his way into writing or co-writing hits for pop artists like Brenda Lee and Cliff Richard. Then, in 1962, Garson composed “ Our Day Will Come” with lyricist Bob Hilliard for American R&B group Ruby & the Romantics. When it was released the following year, it topped the Hot 100 Billboard chart and sold well over a million copies. “It was his biggest moneymaker, and he did some silly things with the royalty rights, but I think it was a learning curve for him,” Darmet says. “You know that saying, is the glass half full or half empty? My dad’s glass was always full, so full that it was overflowing with positiveness. If you lost it, the glass would fill up again. He didn’t have that fear of not being able to create something great again and generate what’s needed. If there are any qualities I’ve gotten from him, that’s one of them.” Plantasia Audiophile Edition is a 2xLP pressed at 45rpm from a deluxe remastering of the original master tapes.**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.

a b "Mother Earth's Plantasia Gets First Official Vinyl Reissue". Pitchfork. Condé Nast. 22 March 2019 . Retrieved 19 April 2019. 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. 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." Over time, most of the experiments referenced in The Secret Life of Plants book were discredited. They weren't designed to rule out other explanations that were equally plausible and their results couldn't be replicated by other researchers. Nowadays, most academics regard the book as pseudoscience. "We know that [plants] have all the same kind of senses we do, but they don't have specialized organs for them," explains Heidi Appel, a plant biologist and professor at the University of Toledo. "People always underestimate plants at one level, because they aren't like us, and yet our propensity to anthropomorphize everything — to project the way we see the world, we view the world, we think about the world — on other things that are not human means that we also have this ability to overestimate what plants can do." Mort Garson's wonderfully strange album of Moog compositions gets its first official rerelease since 1976.

Catalog

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. 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 The album also gained popularity on YouTube, with the full album (uploaded without permission) gaining millions of views and thousands of comments spread over multiple different bootleg uploads. [9] 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 ide ar” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”