VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sacred Bones announces an archival release from Canadian-born electronic pioneer and composer, Mort Garson, titled Journey to the Moon and Beyond, to be released July 21, 2023. With the news, comes “Moon Journey,” the soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. Nearly in tandem with the release date, July 20th will mark Garson’s 99th birthday, and the anniversary of the moon landing.
Garson is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His best-known album is Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played “for plants and the people who love them.”
It’s hard not to use plant terminology when discussing the long, strange career—and subsequent renaissance—of Mort Garson. Like a seed buried deep and left to germinate for months (or in this instance, decades), his great body of work was scattered in record bins and tape closets and all but forgotten in pop culture. A classically trained musician and electronic researcher with a tireless work ethos that led to nearly over a thousand writing and arranging credits, Mort Garson’s music got buried in the topsoil of time.
When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more. (And naturally, just playing the vinyl reissue of Plantasia at home made every single plant in your house thrive.)
Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives 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, slumbering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name. The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like “Western Dragon,” but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information.
The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson’s soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive. So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort’s many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.
Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world—in small daily things, popular trends, and big historical events—with our tweets, posts, reaction videos, and the like. In that way, Garson lived such history and then added his own little spin on things.
