mort garson: mother earth's plantasia

The Great Thunder present a reissue of Mort Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia, originally released in 1976. Garson is well known as one of the pioneers of electronic music in the late '60s and some may have heard of his contributions to quite a few pop hits back in the day when he wrote and conducted orchestral arrangements for a few popular artists. During the second half of the 1960s, Mort Garson and his sidekicks Paul Beaver and Jacques Wilson among others, discovered the newly invented synthesizer courtesy of Robert Moog and made it an integral part of the future pop music even before Wendy Carlos released Switched On Bach in 1968. Plantasia was recorded and released a few years past Garson's monumental works: The Zodiac's Cosmic Sounds (1967), The Wozard Of Iz's An Electronic Odyssey (1968), and Lucifer's Black Mass (1971). Plantasia, originally released in 1976, has been labeled "warm earth music for plants . . . and the people who love them." So you as the listener can imagine that this is a rather bright affair, far from the dark and seething atmosphere of the earlier electronic pieces. A shining diversity of stylistic devices used as the foundation for dreamy and colorful compositions, which works like a soundtrack for a non-existent movie. The warm, yet haunting Moog melodies can still create a rather sinister vibe in their most playful and surreal moments, similar to what you would expect from a mid-seventies horror flicks from Italy. It is a feeling that, despite everything seeming peaceful and relaxed on the surface, something utterly dire is about to rise up. These are certainly just a few passages and when Mort Garson and his mates move on from lush orchestral soul arrangements to something white men always consider to be tribal music of the North American natives, you will drift with them from one scene of your inner mind movie to the next. At this point in the seventies, the technical requirements had already been a bit better with new inventions such as electronic percussion which gets used here and there, conjuring memories of records by German electronic pioneers from the same era, such as Cluster, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream. And despite the twinkle-toed harmonies and big arrangements, which point at the big band music and orchestral pop Garson originated from, the whole work is futuristic and intriguing.