Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia was not initially distributed like an ordinary album. Customers received it when they bought a plant from the Mother Earth shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, or a Simmons mattress from Sears. Its intended listener was described in the subtitle: “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them.”
The claim that plants benefit from music is not what makes the record endure. More interesting is how the imagined audience affected the composition. Garson’s Moog pieces are melodic, gently animated and full of rounded attacks, small upward figures and bright changes in register. Titles such as “Symphony for a Spider Plant” and “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos” give each piece a domestic setting before a note is heard.
A synthesizer was often introduced as a machine of the future. Garson placed it beside leaves, soil and routine household care. The record did not ask the Moog to imitate nature convincingly. It used electronic sound to address something that could not answer back. That odd premise produced music with none of the aggression or technical display often attached to early synthesizer demonstrations.
