This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
Two years in the making, Angel in the Detail is an enthralling & captivating release where distinctive vocals & lyrical imagery float over textural ambience, hypnotic guitar, synth washes & spellbinding bass pulses.
Out August 23rd on Metropolis. More information can be found here.
Neurot Recordings are proud to reissue the landmark collaboration Neurosis & Jarboe, which was originally released in 2003, incoming on 2nd August. This latest version is fully remastered and with entirely new artwork from Aaron Turner, available on vinyl for the first time, as well as CD and digital formats.
Steve Von Till explains the idea behind the remastering; "Bob Weston (Chicago Mastering Service, and member of Shellac) worked closely with Noah on making these new versions sound as good as the possibly can. Noah has the most trained critical ear for fidelity out of all of us being an engineer himself. We recorded this ourselves with consumer level Pro Tools back then, in order to be able to experiment at home in getting different sounds and writing spontaneously. The technology has come a long way since then and we thought we could run it through better digital to analog conversion and trusted Bob Weston to be able to bring out the best in it....This new mastered version is a bit more open, with a better stereo image, and better final eq treatment."
When two independent and distinct spheres overlap, the resulting ellipse tends to emphasise the most striking and powerful characteristics of each body. Such is the case with this particular collaboration between heavy music pioneers Neurosis and the multi-faceted performer Jarboe (who performed in Swans and who has collaborated with an array of people from Blixa Bargeld, J.G. Thirlwell, Attila Csihar, Bill Laswell, Merzbow, Justin K. Broadrick, Helen Money, Father Murphy, the list goes on...) The musicians pull from one another some of the most harrowing and unusual sounds ever heard from either artist at the time - a sentiment which also rings true to some 15 years later.
The collaboration is a deeply textured mosaic that is a culmination of merged aesthetics from two major influences on free-thinking sounds. It unlocked the hidden potential of electronic music as a new force in heavy rock. At a time when groups like Oneida, Wolf Eyes and Black Dice were beginning to experiment with technology in making mind-numbing leaden electro-drone freed from any essence of "dance music," Neurosis & Jarboe redefined all notions of their past - and outlined the course of heavy music to come.
Post-metal sludge avant garde powerhouse SUMAC follow their collaboration with legendary Japanese guitarist and singer/performer Keiji Haino on Thrill Jockey (American Dollar Bill – Keep Facing Sideways, You are too Hideous to Look at Face on) with another monolith.
Keiji Haino – Guitar, Voice, Flute, Taepyeongso Aaron Turner – Guitar Nick Yacyshyn – Drums Brian Cook – Bass
Vanishing Twin is songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion; and on this album they have made their first artistic statement for the ages.
Some of its great power comes from liberation. The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. "KRK (At Home In Strange Places)," which summons up the spirit of Sun Ra's Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk.
The magical Morricone-esque lounge of "You Are Not an Island," the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of "Invisible World" and burbling sci-fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, "Plane te Sauvage," were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury. The only two outsiders to work on the recording were "6th member" and engineer Syd Kemp and trusted friend Malcolm Catto, band leader of the spiritual jazz/future funk outfit The Heliocentrics, who mixed seven of the tracks (with Lucas taking care of the other three).
Vanishing Twin formed in 2015 - their first LP, Choose Your Own Adventure, which came out on Soundway in 2016; followed by the darker, more abstract, mostly instrumental Dream By Numbers EP in 2017.
The band explored their more experimental tendencies on the Magic And Machines tape released by Blank Editions in 2018, an improvised session recorded in the dead of night, offering a glimpse into their practice of deep listening, near band telepathy, and ritually improvised sound making. These sessions formed the basis of The Age Of Immunology.
There's something about the Swedish city of Malmo that doesn’t add up.
Named the "happiest" city in Sweden in 2016 (who gets the job of judging these things?), Malmo's DNA contains a "none-coding" strain that reveals the city's penchant for a world more studious, fashioned in a vintage era, telescoped by pop culture that arrives via the TV-approved bridge that connects it to Denmark. Surely, it can’t be the same place.
Marleen Nilsson, Magnus Bodin and Anders Hansson of Death and Vanilla couldn't come from anywhere else. They are dreamers, antiquarians, music-obsessed individuals, lauded by the media for their last album To Where The Wild Things Are from 2015…
"Swedish exponents of dreamily lovely psych and lush, late-60s-style baroque pop." The Guardian
"Lush and enveloping, reminiscent of Curt Boettcher and Margo Guryan." The Wire
"Fantastically eerie." Clash
The trio's love of all things "old" is well known – they've tinkled ivories, played vibraphone, recorded with a Sennheiser microphone and a nod to everything from Fun Boy Three to Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Contonou, while still roaming somewhere between an ambient Eno and Cocteau Twins at a late-night soiree.
Prior to recording their new album Are You A Dreamer?, they scored several soundtracks, that process undoubtedly influencing the new album's dreamlike euphoria built with added mellotron and affected electric guitar. Expanded with bass and drums in their quest for the grail, Death And Vanilla's songs are longer; more plush and pampered; more hypnotic and haunting.
Are You A Dreamer? is melancholy at its most refined, riddled with super-memorable motifs and melodies that nestle in reflective echo. Death And Vanilla are an alluring confection, hard to resist and wantonly moreish as Marleen Nilsson’s sepia tones are embraced by the trio’s gorgeous arrangements and intricate ambience.
Umberto is an artist whose work is distinctly cinematic. Composer Matt Hill's performances and delicate compositions taken together have the cumulative ability to surprise. Hill, whose Umberto moniker is an homage to director Umberto Lenzi, is an experienced and active film composer, most recently scoring the film All That We Destroy. In addition to film and commercial work, Umberto has released a number of lauded solo recordings. Hill's compositions stand apart as beautiful as they are impenetrable, with pulsing synths that hint at 80s slasher films while pensive string passages evoke emotions without being sentimental. On Umberto's Thrill Jockey debut Helpless Spectator, his haunting music is otherworldly and affecting alike, leaving the listener with an unsettling and profound air of mystery.
Umberto's early recordings harken back to classic synth-driven sci-fi and horror soundtracks. Helpless Spectator uses synthesizers in an entirely different manner. Cold, looming monolith tones are now warm, softer pads that envelope the listener while guitar, cello, banjo and pedal steel add movement and light. Still, Hill unsettles with his arrangements and melodic phrasing. As a composer, Hill has moved to more extensive use of live instrumentation. In addition to playing guitar, bass, and piano himself, Hill worked with fellow composer and recording artist Aaron Martin who played cello and bowed banjo on the majority of the album. "Idaho Joe" Winslow’s pedal steel guitar adds depth and subtle countermelodies to "The Higher Room" and "Leafless Tree."
The name Helpless Spectator is taken from the Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Hill was taken with the concept Jaynes set out to disprove that "Consciousness can no more modify the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes." The darkness and obliviousness inherent in this concept, the notion that while we perceive control, we are not in control, serves as a great metaphor for the contrasts of Umberto's music. Warm tones and nuanced arrangements with cello and pedal steel are not typically the instruments of dread, yet Hill achieves a creeping undertone of dread with his deceptively complex pieces. Musical figures both melodically and rhythmically simple intertwine, build, and collapse upon one another. The dissonant tensions that steadily grow rarely completely resolve; rather they dissipate into a new set of questions. Unexpected shifts and turns in even the most tender movements of Helpless Spectator are inflected with a contemplative melancholy and fragility.
Umberto makes masterful use of varied textures throughout the album, blending supernatural effects and grounded instruments to create distinct atmospheres. Helpless Spectator is inquisitive and moving in equal measure, an album of somber elegance and delicate arrangements whose cumulative effect of unease is entirely unexpected.
Laurent Jeanneau's work as Kink Gong has been one of the most compellingly quixotic and unique projects in underground music for almost two decades, but I have only recently begun to scratch the surface of his mountain of work. He is probably best known as a prolific ethnomusicologist, occasionally surfacing on Sublime Frequencies. He has also self-released over 150 collections of ethnic minority music recorded during his many travels throughout Africa, China, and Southeast Asia. Naturally, that restless curiosity has made a deep impact on Jeanneau's own sensibility as an artist, resulting in a series fairly uncategorizable collage-based soundscape albums like this landmark 2013 release. At the root of Voices are a host of recordings of indigenous vocalists made in China, Vietnam, and Laos, but Jeanneau ingeniously transforms them into a haunting, otherworldly, and timeless vision that blurs the boundaries of tradition, experimentation, art, and reality.
The opening "Baozoo Khen" is the most sublime and powerful expression of Kink Gong's transformational wizardry on the album, as Jeanneau collages vocals from two women and a man into an eerily beautiful mass chorus of unusually harmonizing drones.There is also a backdrop of slowed-down mouthorgan, but the true brilliance and artistry of the piece lies how the voices endlessly converge and dissolve, hypnotically seesawing between their own wandering melodies and a single haunting, sustained chord.It is extremely simple and absolutely perfect in its unearthly, ritualistic reverie.Wisely, Jeanneau does not attempt to maintain that level of intensity for the rest of Voices, but he does masterfully deepen the spell, expanding his emotional and textural palette further with each new piece.In the following "Ar Mir Sanq Paq Aq Li," an Akha woman amiably and animatedly delivers a singsong monologue over gently, rippling bed of Jeanneau's lute playing.The effect is quite a dreamlike one, as the underlying music gradually evolves from a languorous sense of suspended animation to a multilayered cacophony of decontextualized voices, pointillist strings, and jabbering electronics.The first half of the album draws to a close with another highlight in the form of "Cym Wu Khmu," which ingeniously marries the visceral clatter of a Buddhist percussion ensemble with the playfully chattering voice of a Khmu woman.The percussion is impressively heavy and stomps relentlessly forward, yet the warbling and cheery voice in its midst creates an endearingly ambiguous mood.  
The second half's pleasures are a bit more abstract, thought they are no less unique and inventive.The side begins with "3 Hani Pipa," which is probably the album's most curious and overtly experimental piece.Ostensibly, it is a collage of three different songs, but it is impossible to tell where one song ends and another begins or even which parts are actually from a song.Instead, it is sounds like an insistently strummed lute beneath a surreal chaos of hooting and chanting that resembles a raucous and unruly parade.The following "Sixian Miao Choir" is another lute piece of sorts, but it seems heavily processed and resembles overlapping recordings of someone violently playing a stand-up bass.While the sounds of the titular choir do drift through the proceedings, the overall impression is more like a feral and unhinged free-jazz performance (particularly when the "strangled balloon" howls burst onto the scene). The closing "Haoshendd" continues the cavalcade of disorienting surprises beautifully, as Jeanneau transforms the sounds of a lusheng (a Hmong pipe instrument) into a queasily blurred impressionist haze.Interestingly, it is a piece that lacks any recognizable voices, which makes it an odd choice for the final act of an album entitled Voices.It is also the only piece that sounds like it could have been a Kink Gong solo creation, as almost all melody or regional character has been sanded away to leave only subtly a discordant fog of drones.I suppose that makes it the album's least compelling piece, but it is nevertheless very effective at ending the album on an enigmatic and eerie note.
On one level, Voices stands with Harappian Night Recordings' The Glorious Gongs of Hainuwele as one the great recent masterpieces of ethnological forgery, as it is exotic, absorbing, and vividly realized in all the right ways.On a deeper level, however, it is more like a loving homage to the regional cultural traditions of the Laotian, Vietnamese, and Chinese villages that Jeanneau spent time in.With Voices, Jeanneau does not impose himself or appropriate ethnic minority cultures so much as he celebrates their vanishing traditions.While his transformations are certainly significant and occasionally dramatic, they are largely self-effacing ones that serve primarily to amplify and focus the existing attributes of the raw material: the emotions and performances in this album feel real, honest, and direct.Jeanneau's artistry lies primarily in his unerring intuition for recontextualizing these many voices in a way that is alluring to adventurous ears outside of rural Southeast Asia, yet does not sacrifice or betray their essence.That is an admirable approach and all the more so because it worked so beautifully: Voices is a wonderfully strange and multifaceted suite of songs that feels like a valiant attempt to convey everything that is joyful, dark, playful, and mysterious about being alive in a single piece of art.
Each new Richard Skelton release is a bit of a surprise these days, as his aesthetic is in a permanent state of flux shaped by where he is living and what he is thinking about at any given time. For the most part, his more divergent and experimental forays tend to surface as digital-only releases, but this physical release explores the least expected direction of all: a return to the more melodic, song-based aesthetic of his classic Type LPs from a decade ago. Obviously, Skelton is quite a different artist now than he was back then, so Border Ballads not a return so much as it is a very different vision ("telluric, grounded, earthen") rooted in a semi-familiar structure. Given that Landings and Marking Time were the Skelton albums that I first fell in love with, it is very hard to maintain any semblance of objectivity with this long-delayed sequel (of sorts). It feels like Border Ballads recaptures the transcendent magic of its predecessors only fitfully though, as its deep melancholy feels more like a somber, earthbound elegy than an ecstatic catharsis.
The circumstances and inspirations behind Border Ballads are atypically simple and straightforward, as Skelton was primarily driven by the "hinterland topography" of a rural stretch of the England-Scotland border.He makes a particular point of mentioning the various watercourses delineating the region, which I found curious, as there is little about these pieces that suggests a spiritual kinship with liquid in any way.Rather, these twelves miniatures evoke the sense of the sun slowly rising over a stark and wintry landscape.There is a pervasive sense of isolation and sadness saturating this entire album that I cannot imagine originating during any other season, yet Skelton apparently worked on this album for two years.Perhaps this is a project that he returned to only during his darker moments though.In any case, the simplicity of the album's inspiration is carried through in the modestness and simplicity of the pieces themselves, as Border Ballads approaches something like neo-classical chamber music.For most other artists, such a structure would not be a conspicuously modest avenue, but recent Richard Skelton fare has more closely resembled shifting tectonic plates or collapsing stars than it has a man playing a haunted viola melody over some minor key piano.Despite that newly human scale, however, Skelton remains more at home with geological time scales that human ones: the melodies of Border Ballads more closely resemble the slow-motion swells of drone music than they do any conventional string ensemble.
While it is admittedly quite a pleasant change of pace to see Skelton returning to melody and songcraft, his melodies were never the primary appeal of his work: the brilliance of those earlier albums lay in their visceral and dazzling execution. I had never heard anyone play a bowed instrument quite like Skelton, as his strings churned, heaved, shivered, and threw off sprays of harmonic sparks as if they were alive.Happily, some shades of that supernatural conjuring return here in pieces like "Altar Valley" and "Spur."That former is especially wonderful, as any obvious traces of structure dissolve as the central theme lazily twists, undulates, and swells.Moreover, both pieces highlight Skelton's singular talent for beautifully carving through ambient languor with sharp tones or vivid clarity at the right moments. I had missed that bite and crackling electricity, so it is a true delight to find it resurfacing on a handful of Border Ballads' highlights.
For the most part, however, Border Ballads feels like a deliberately composed album with melodic structures and chord progressions that do not feel supernaturally alive.There are certainly many fine moments to be found, but that approach does not exactly play to Skelton's strengths.For example, the somber piano arpeggios of pieces like "Kist and Ark" and "Roan" feel like a bit of a regression to me.I suspect part of that is my own issue, as I have a potentially irrational hostility towards pianos.Nevertheless, some instruments are very well-suited for weaving illusions and some are not.For me, pianos fall into the latter category, as I have yet to hear a piano work so brilliant that it makes me forget that I am hearing someone playing a piano (though Arvo Pärt’s "Spiegel in Spiegel" may be an exception).With Richard Skelton albums, I do not want to hear chords and scales–I want to fall under a spell.The prominent presence of minor key piano patterns is like hearing someone who long ago figured out how to forge his own path go back to making music with the same rules and conventions as everyone else.
Thankfully, that statement is likely true only fleetingly, as Skelton is an artist who always seems to have a number of irons in the fire these days.For all I know, there could be another monster Inward Circles album on the horizon that will knock me flat.With Border Ballads, Skelton just felt like composing a suite of moody, comparatively straightforward violin and cello pieces.Some of them are quite good and they amount to a uniformly strong and thematically coherent whole, but this album does not scratch the itch I hoped it would.Alas.On the bright side, Skelton remains an eternal wellspring of gravitas and quiet intensity.Also, his craftsmanship and attention to nuance are focused as ever, as the strings in a pieces like "Fair Shining" moan, shudder, and leave spectral trails in all the right ways.In fact, Skelton is in fine form in virtually every respect, which makes it perplexing that Border Ballads feels like a comparatively minor album.It just has the curious feel of being a (good) soundtrack rather than a stand-alone work.And, in an abstract way, that might be exactly what it is: not a soundtrack to a film or piece of art, but a soundtrack for the landscapes of Skelton's rural borderlands.
This inscrutable cabal of post-industrial scavengers continues to burrow into our murky cultural subconscious with a pair of minor new releases. Characteristically, both albums are heavily conceptual and mystery-shrouded, but The Recounting of Night Time at least volunteers that it "focuses principally on a certain piece of German gothic cinema made during the late 1970s." That certainly seems to suggest that a badly worn VHS of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is at the heart of the sounds, but Fossil Aerosol Mining Project are (as always) far more interested in what time has done to the physical media than than whatever that media's original intended content was. About the superior Archeological Testing in the Land of Monkeys, even less is revealed ("A fatigued response to reminders of a cyclical past, surprisingly exaggerated in the years of the rooster and the dog"). Both releases offer their flashes of inspiration, but it is the digital-only and conceptually vague Archeological Testing that unexpectedly feels like some of the collective's finest work to date.
The Recounting of Night Time's opening "An Unexpected Appearance of Folkway" is both maddeningly deceptive and weirdly perfect at setting the stage for the album to come, as its initial fanfare of sickly and smeared violins quickly gets mired in a noisy loop that continually restarts itself.Then it disappears completely to reveal a new theme that sounds like a distant fog horn melody.As it turns out, those brief flirtations with melody are arguably the album's last.The "fog horn" sounds, on the other hand, are an apt harbinger for an album that feels like a supernatural fog slowly filling my home in the night.It is not a particularly evil fog though: aside from an omnipresent backdrop of ominous, murky drones, the atmosphere never darkens beyond "vaguely unsettling."In fact, I would describe the aesthetic as lying somewhere between "time becoming frozen in a single repeating moment" and "being briefly haunted by a very lazy poltergeist."Almost all of the sounds evoke the sense of a darkened room where all of the electronic devices have quietly flickered to life, but all get immediately fixated on a single action: the record player skips, the VCR keeps failing to eject a tape, and the TV screen just shows crackling static with occasional mysterious glimpses of something more. That is a genuinely unique and fascinating atmosphere to conjure and Fossil Aerosol Mining Project do it beautifully.Unfortunately, they are quite content to stay there and the album feels forever stuck in that same moment pregnant with deepening events that never come.
To some degree, the album's lengthier pieces stretch a bit beyond that monochromatic, hypnagogic spell of eerie emptiness, but they usually just do so by slowly building to a somewhat higher pitch of textural intensity.The only real exceptions come near the end of the album.In "The Retelling of Fragmentary Legends," all of the initial themes of Night Time are reprised in a surreal miasma of creaking, hissing, and whooshing noises en route to a brief but beautiful passage of ghostly synth chords."Emptying the Village," on the other hand, features a blearily somber chord progression right from the start, then embellishes it with a warped, quavering melodic fragment.By default, it is the album's strongest piece and I am quite fond of it.If a few more pieces had cohered into some semblance of rhythm, melody, or harmonic activity, The Recounting of Night Time probably would have been a much stronger release.I suspect that was simply not possible, however, as Fossil Aerosol Mining Project seem like they are EXTREMELY invested in the thematic purity of their work.As such, it is likely that this album had an extremely constrained palette and that its artistry lay in making something compelling from those unlikely and unmusical fragments.Few other artists would use a thirty-year-old "field recording" of a poorly attended screening in a mildewed movie theater as one of their primary sound sources and I cannot blame them.I am delighted that this shadowy mass of weirdos is more than happy to take on that challenge though, even if it does not always yield the most dynamic music.The Recounting of Night Time is almost pure atmosphere.
As far as I know, Archeological Testing bears no intentional relation to The Recounting of Night Time, yet it weirdly feels like a willful return to the same territory with some significant improvements. The mood is certainly a similar one, even if the sound sources are completely different.In the case of this release, however, there is not a sense of endless suspended animation, as a jabbering cacophony regularly and gleefully breaks through the fog of hiss and subterranean drones.Even the drones themselves are more vibrant this time around, as "A Poorly Remembered Decade" feels like it is permanently at a low boil.The artists also make especially effective use of vocal samples, alternately using them as a narrative tool (of sorts) or for pure distorted and demonic mindfuckery.Impressively, the opening "Armassist" uses them for both purposes at the same time, as a pitch-shifted voice with a vaguely Southern accent kicks off the album by proclaiming "Somethin's wrong somewhe-uh!"That 'somewhere' is arguably the world of this album, as I often feel like I am surrounded by gibbering, skittering chaos as I hallucinate screams and strange voices emerging from the static of my possessed television set. However, that infernal scene is endearingly undercut by the delightful lunacy of some of the sounds and voices.There is a perverse element of humor that surfaces throughout the proceedings that the band's spiritual forefather George Romero would appreciate."Disco Stones" is an especially fine example of that exquisite blend, mingling smeared and delirious funk Muzak with something resembling strangled walkie-talkie transmissions.
For those amenable to Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's post-modernist celebration of the lingering physic residue of forgotten culture, there are an impressive number of highlights to be found throughout Archeological Testing.My favorite of the lot is "Nowhere Near (11th Month Remix)," which resembles an inspired variation on the classic "sci-fi tribal" aesthetic of FAMP’s erstwhile collaborators Zoviet France (it sounds like a series of reality distorting, extra-dimensional howls reverberating through an abandoned space station).That deliciously creepy and unreal atmosphere carries into the following "Aocean" to some degree as well, though its simmering dread feels more akin to Solaris than Alien.The final moments of that piece also feel like the album's haunted and enigmatic heart, as a distorted voice repeatedly intones "With each word, with each breath, with each moment."That hot streak remarkably continues for the entirety of the album's second half, as the bleary kitsch of the following "Disco Stones" gives way to the dynamic phantasmagoria of "The Night Roar" and the eerily lovely coda of "Ruined Melody."The unpredictability and variety of these pieces truly brings out the best in Fossil Aerosol Mining Project’s aesthetic and I am curious to know if that was a deliberate choice or just a happy accident.After all, this album is described as "unplanned and largely unannounced," so it could very well be a collection of unrelated recent (or not recent) pieces that did not fit with one the band's more rigorously themed formal albums.It is perplexing that such a fine album was allowed to slip into the world largely unnoticed, though I suppose self-promotion has never exactly been one of this collective's greatest strengths.In any case, I am delighted that Archeological Testing surfaced despite its lack of planning and fanfare, as it is one of Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's most dynamic and compelling releases that I have encountered.
Plantasia has become a well-known record despite a limited initial 1976 release to anyone buying a houseplant from the Mother Earth store in Los Angeles. This was music for plant owners to create an environment of optimal growth - simple haunting melodies composed on a moog.
Mort Garson’s musical resume is somewhat bizarre. In the 1950s and '60s, he wrote several pop hits and became a trusted arranger and composer in the fields of easy listening, film and television, working on recordings by such artists as Julie London, Doris Day, Laurence Harvey, and even the string arrangements on Glen Campbell’s "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Then Garson discovered the Moog synthesizer and took a leap into what may be termed electronic exotica, releasing such oddities as Zodiac - Cosmic Sounds, with tracks dedicated to each horoscope sign, Black Mass (under the pseudonym Lucifer), and The Unexplained - Electronic Musical Impressions of The Occult. His broad interests and experience meant that Garson was well placed to compose and record Plantasia, and also to remain a relatively obscure figure. Plantasia probably owes a good deal to the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Christopher Bird (an author with previous on the topic of dowsing) and Peter Tompkins, who had served with the (OSS) Office of Strategic Services behind enemy lines during WWII, along with hundreds of first-generation Italian-Americans who voluntarily returned to Italy to help tie the enemy down with anti-Nazi resistance offensives. Bird and Tompkins’s theories about plant sentience were influenced by Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation expert who, after attaching a lie detector to a Drachea cane, was convinced that plants felt pain, fear, affection, and were capable of ESP. Backster later experimented on yogurt bacteria, eggs, and human sperm, and was probably influenced by the writings by Jagadish Chandra Bose.
The music stands up remarkably. The next disc I had cued up was Oren Ambarchi’s Simian Angel and it took a few minutes into the opening piece "Palm Sugar Candy" before I realized Garson had finished. For all its apparent simplicity, Plantasia is a deceptively substantial and varied album. The sinewy synth mutations of "Concerto For Philodenron and Pothos" and "Rhapsody in Green" for example, flow through light and sinister moods like a wandering vine captured in time-lapse photography.
It is easy to imagine an award-winning short animation film wherein hip West Coast foliage grooves along to the swaying melody and plonking rhythms of "Baby’s Tears Blues" and the breezy "Swinging Spathiphyllums." Equally, the creeping, swirls of "Ode To An African Violet" belong in, and indeed may already be in, a video game. I detect from "You Don’t Have To Walk A Begonia" a potent whiff of seaside pier amusement arcade and cheesy bingo parlor pipe organ. The title track first made me think of refreshing raindrops watering weary leaves and tired minds, but it blooms into something of a vivid musical canopy of Moog trumpets. "A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair" and "Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant" hint at at the stylized world of Gnac’s fantastic "Sevens" disc, with its contradictory mundane glamour, jet set travel, drab hotels, and weary secret agents - an accidental or unconscious link to the real life worlds of Backster and Tompkins.
On some obscure Venn diagram, Plantasia sits just within the point where espionage and manipulation techniques meet innocence and nature. It would make a great addition to the soundtrack of Douglass Trumbull’s 1972 post-apocalyptic environmental sci-fi film Silent Running. The lilting, spaced out charm of these ten tracks transcends the backstories and slightly von Dänikenesque musings about plant consciousness - which have long been overtaken by philosophical debate on artificial intelligence, sex toy robots, and digital life. Silent Running ends with a lone remaining Earth forest floating through space in a dome, tended by a single robot. We are not there yet, but it is arguably sad to consider the less than secret life of plants in modern agriculture, where they are speed grown in relentless artificial light and never allowed to sleep. Such a fate is the antithesis of Plantasia which was also briefly distributed to those buying a Simmons mattress from limited participating Sears stores. The 2019 reissue is, naturally, available on green vinyl and the cover artwork is still hopelessly harmless.