365 ELECTRONIC MUSIC ALBUMS IN 365 DAYS

Day 110: Mort Garson — Mother Earth's Plantasia

Genres: Electronic / Ambient / Moog / New Age
Year: 1976
Country: Canada

(This is a personal opinion; I have no formal knowledge of music theory, but I love electronic music. Please keep that in mind while reading.)

Today I listened to music from the window of a bus.

Roads, trees rushing past, little towns appearing and disappearing...

And somehow I ended up listening to an album originally composed for plants.

Mother Earth's Plantasia is probably the best-known work by Mort Garson, a Canadian-born composer and one of the early musicians to seriously embrace the Moog synthesizer. Released in 1976, the album was originally rather difficult to obtain: copies were given away when buying a plant at Los Angeles' Mother Earth Plant Boutique or even certain Simmons mattresses sold through Sears.

Yes.

Electronic music to keep your plants happy.

And honestly...

it also works surprisingly well for humans stuck on a bus for several hours.

Plantasia opens with one of those synthesizer sounds that immediately feels like the future as imagined from the 1970s: innocent, warm and slightly extraterrestrial.

Then come wonderful titles like Symphony for a Spider Plant, Baby's Tears Blues and Ode to an African Violet.

The record is built almost entirely around the Moog, but Garson somehow keeps the machine from sounding cold. His melodies feel like tiny creatures moving between leaves.

Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos almost sounds like music for a video game that wouldn't exist for decades, while Rhapsody in Green and Swingin' Spathiphyllums somehow make taking care of houseplants sound funky.

And I simply cannot ignore a title like:

You Don't Have to Walk a Begonia.

Thank you, Mort.

I needed to know that.

The journey ends with A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair and Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant, completing just over thirty minutes of strange, sweet and surprisingly alive synthesizer music.

PERSONAL CONCLUSIONS:

Listening to Plantasia while watching trees pass outside the window felt strangely appropriate.

The album was created as music for plants...

and I ended up hearing it while an entire album of green photographs flew past me at 90 kilometers per hour.

There's something beautiful about that period of electronic music.

Synthesizers still seemed like machines sent from the future, and nobody completely knew what the hell they were supposed to do with them.

So Mort Garson decided to make music for ferns.

Why not?

And maybe that freedom is exactly why Plantasia remains so charming.

It doesn't try to be enormous.

It doesn't try to impress you.

It simply wants to accompany something while it grows.

A plant.

A landscape.

Or maybe someone staring through the window of a bus...

waiting to reach their destination.

DAY 110 — MOTHER EARTH'S PLANTASIA

The earth is more than a rock...

[ LISTEN TO THE ALBUM ]