Mort Garson – 'Journey To The Moon‘ (Space black vinyl LP, die-cut spaceman helmet cover)
Garson was a prolific commercial composer already in his 40s when the Moog modular came into his life, and he used it to crank out increasingly bonkers albums like ‘Plantasia’ (music designed to help your house plants grow, and sold in head shops) and ‘The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions Of The Occult)’ under the name Ataraxia. His output was a staple of US bargain bins until his inevitable rediscovery led to his discography fetching daft money.
This album brings together various pieces Garson composed in the 1960s and 1970s with ‘Moon Journey’, a six-minute electronic composition for the CBS live news coverage of the 1969 Apollo Moon landing. The very idea reads like something from a parallel history, a toytown sci-fi short story knocked out by a satirist.
As does the music. Listening to this album is a mind- and genre-bending time travel experience, back to when when the synthesiser was the go-to sound of optimistic futurism and when fully orchestrated lounge music for swinging bachelor pads would sell in droves. Garson trades in both with effortless skill, up to his waist in kitsch but somehow rising above it.
‘Moon Journey’ was assumed long lost, but it was dug up from an archive and restored here to its mad bleepy glory. Its six minutes seem to be evoking a literal journey to the Moon, all Moog fanfares and white noise blasts to start with, followed by a floating gravity-free section which mysteriously becomes a 12-bar space party of squelching and electronic snare insanity. It all returns to a more sombre mood for the end, as if the astronauts are shaking hands with the President while agreeing among themselves that what happened on the Moon stays on the Moon.
Other highlights include the wonky synth idents for TV ads, particularly ‘Music For Advertising #8’ which sounds like a normal broadcast getting jacked by Moog-wielding aliens. There’s also ‘Captain DJ Disco UFO (Pt II)’, a dancefloor cash-in seven-inch from 1978 that fetches over £100 on the collector’s market.
This is a record you could absolutely play at your next social gathering without scaring the children, in fact, they’ll love it. It’s not challenging, in the way that Garson’s avant garde contemporaries like Subotnick were, but in many ways its very straightness renders it way weirder.
