Name: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Brand: Mort Garson

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

SBR3030LPC15

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Colour

green

Colour details

Green with Brown Splatter

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Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

LP+++ - New Version as Part of Sacred Bones 15th anniversary.

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-08-19

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

0843563150719

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1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes / Signed copies: No / green

SBR3030LP

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black

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format: No

2019-06-21

0843563116036

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1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

SBR3030LPC11

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "SBR3030LPC11"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Green / Pink

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LP++++ - New Version as Part of Sacred Bones 15th anniversary.

0843563150382

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1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / green

Artist

Mort Garson

Genre GB

Experimental / Avant-Garde / Industrial / Noise

Label GB

Sacred Bones Records

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.

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 books 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.