Mort Garson - Mother Earth's Plantasia (Double LP Audiophile Edition-Black Vinyl)

Sacred Bones recently found the original master tapes for Mother Earth’s Plantasia,recorded by Mort Garson in 1976, and thought to be lost for more than 40 years. Although Mort had kept and stored a large amount of his analog tapes over the years, they were often in large unorganized batches. This was unsurprising, as his prolific output and work schedule over the years didn't leave a lot of free time to manage a large tape archive. While initial versions of our reissue of the album were taken from a carefully transferred mint copy of the original vinyl pressing, we were fortunate to finally discover the original master tapes while going through a surprise box of Mort Garson tapes that turned up much later than the first archive we had access to. An unremarkable mislabeled tape in an unmarked box turned out to contain the stereo master recordings of Mother Earth's Plantasia. All forthcoming versions of the record will be pressed from a new, pristine remaster of these original tapes.

• 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
• 10 Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant

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.