The Wozard Of Iz
Member of: Mort Garson
Journey To The Moon And Beyond
Black vinyl. Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives (Plantasia, Ataraxia, Lucifer) have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom. Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man’s sound. There’s the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson), some previously unreleased and newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is “Zoos of the World,” where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, s…
Mother Earth's Plantasia
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 …
Didn't You Hear?
Six years before the release of his landmark Mother Earth’s Plantasia LP, composer and arranger Mort Garson met experimental film director Skip Sherwood, who was interested in an electronic score for his new movie, Didn’t You Hear? While not much is known now about the exact nature of their collaboration, we have Garson’s magnificent score as a record of those heady, early days after his life-changing discovery of the Moog synthesizer. Notable for being one of the earliest screen appearances by …
Music from Patch Cord Productions
No doubt you know the name Mort Garson from his myriad writing, conducting, and arranging credits, topping a thousand in total: the Kim Sisters, Gi Sönne, Lola Novaković, Pfc. Craig Brown, Emilio Pericoli. Or failing that, his sides for Patti Page, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, Percy Faith, and Mr. Magoo himself. Which is to say, Mort Garson’s road to cool cultural caché and the sublimity of Plantasia meant a decades’ long journey through an underworld of sophisticated, international, string-lace…
Electronic Hair Pieces
Mort Garson was the master of the moog and a pioneer in electronic music from the late 60s and 70s where he participated in some unforgotten projects such as Lucifer, The Zodiac, Ataraxia and Plantasia. The following review centers on his album “Electronic Hair pieces” from 1969 on which he tickles your senses with instrumental adaptions of the songs from the musical “Hair”. He performs all the tunes on a contemporary moog synthesizer system even with electronic percussion. Since you might recog…
An Electronic Odyssey
Shipping next week! An extraordinary, acid, counterculture take on The Wizard of Oz created under the auspices of electronic producer, Bernard Krause and combining Jacques Wilson’s inventive lyrics with the moog synthesizers of the legendary Mort Garson. Even in the heady, drug-fuelled atmosphere of sonic exploration that ruled the late Sixties, there was never another album quite like The Wozard of Iz; a psychedelic masterpiece both of and ahead of its time. A psychedelic concept album of es…
Cosmic Sounds
Absolutely essential Cosmic Psych masterpiece now back on Vinyl taken from Analogue Masters and like you’ve never heard it before… The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds was an album released on the ELEKTRA label in August 1967 in the U.K. It was heavily played by John Peel on his Perfumed Garden shows, where he used it as a basis for a competition (He had been sent a copy by Clive Selwood, the then head of Elektra’s London office and later to become Peel’s manager). The LP was extremely popular with Perfume…
Black Mass
This bizarre collection of Moog compositions is credited to a band/artist named Lucifer (or is it "Black Mass?"), but the man behind the machine is better known by his more ordinary given name of Mort Garson. Along with scoring films, producing easy listening records, and co-writing the hit tune "Our Day Will Come," Garson released several electronic music LPs with themes like the Zodiac, the Wizard of Oz, and plant growth stimulation. Black Mass/Lucifer (the cover art is ambiguous as to title) …