Mother Earth's Plantasia (Audiophile Edition)

This is the deluxe double LP audiophile edition of Mort Garson's legendary 1976 album, Mother Earth's Plantasia, pressed on 45rpm double LP and limited to 4000 copies. The edition includes full reproduction of the original booklet, plus liner notes by Andy Beta (Pitchfork). All copies come with a download code, printed on plantable seed paper!

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, MortGarson 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 conven-tion in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device.

This release marks the first official re-issue of the long sought-after cult classic. Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesiz-ing 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".
 

Released: December 2020
Cat: SBR303045
Label: Sacred Bones

Listen

Tracklist

1. Plantasia (3:23)
2. Symphony for a Spider Plant (2:41)
3. Baby’s Tears Blues (3:03)
4. Ode to an African Violet (4:04)
5. Concerto For Philodendron And Pothos (3:09)
6. Rhapsody In Green (3:28)
7. Swingin’ Spathiphyllums (2:59)
8. You Don’t Have To Walk A Begonia (2:31)
9. A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair (2:17)
10. Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant (3:23)