Mort Garson - “Mother Earth’s Plantasia” (2-LP 45 RPM Audiophile Edition)

Jacket Condition: NEAR MINT — Jacket is conservatively graded as “Near Mint” as there may be slight shelf wear from normal handling. Corners are clean and sharp. Looks practically perfect. See photos. Record Condition: NEAR MINT — These LPs have never been played; upon visual inspection, all record sides appear free from any noticeable scratches or defects. Hype Sticker has been preserved and affixed to a protective clear plastic jacket sleeve, which is included. Booklet and seed card with download code are included. I have not redeemed this code; however, I cannot vouch for its validity. Will be shipped in a sturdy, protective cardboard record mailer and/or in a cardboard box wrapped in bubble wrap/protective packaging.

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DESCRIPTION

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), 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. 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 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.”

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.

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.

PLANTASIA 45 RPM 2-LP AUDIOPHILE EDITION:

Pressed at 45 RPM from a remastering of the original master tapes, and split between two heavyweight vinyl discs for optimal sound quality Housed in a deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket Pressed at Quality Record Pressings (QRP) QRP rice paper inner sleeves Includes fully restored original booklet with new liner notes by Andy Beta of Pitchfork Media Includes seed paper download card – plant it and watch it sprout!

TRACK LISTING

1. Plantasia

2. Symphony for a Spider Plant

3. Baby's Tears Blues

4. Ode to An African Violet

5. Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos

6. Rhapsody in Green

7. Swingin' Spathiphyllums

8. You Don't Have to Walk a Begonia

9. A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair 1

10. Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant