PLANTASIA NY Festival to Celebrate 50 Years of Mort Garson's Iconic Moog Album
Mary Lattimore, Laraaji, and SPELLLING will perform at Seed Song Farm in Kingston, NY.
Night Howl and Sacred Bones Records are set to present PLANTASIA NY, a two-day outdoor festival marking the 50th anniversary of composer Mort Garson's Moog album Mother Earth's Plantasia, at Seed Song Farm in Kingston, New York on September 19 and 20. The lineup includes Mary Lattimore, Laraaji, Alabaster DePlume, Spellling, Gigi Masin, JJJJJerome Ellis, Green-House, and Colin Stetson and Brìghde Chaimbeul, with programming to also feature botanical arts and crafts, a curated market, plant sales, and workshops. Sacred Bones is releasing an eco-friendly reissue of the album on September 4, ahead of the festival dates.
The festival will take place at Seed Song Farm in Kingston, NY on September 19 and 20. Tickets and information are available at plantasia-ny.com.
Juilliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Mort Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix.
In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn't The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the book shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon.
Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they're lie detectors, they're telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn't stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.
Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether 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), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. 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.
Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson. Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result.
The album gained an enormous cult following decades after its release. Sacred Bones' 2019 reissue helped introduce Plantasia to a wider global audience, sparking a remarkable second life for Garson's unlikely masterpiece. What was once a strange artifact of 1970s plant-mania has become a beloved evergreen, rediscovered and re-embraced by a new generation of listeners and flourishing far beyond its original moment.
Now, 50 years after its original release, Mother Earth's Plantasia marks a major anniversary moment. To honor Mother Earth, Sacred Bones is releasing the first authorised eco-friendly reissue of Plantasia, pressed on 100% recycled eco-green vinyl and printed on 100% recycled paper. It is housed in a 100% recycled jacket, wrapped in bio-based shrinkwrap, and includes the original Mother Earth's Indoor Plant Care Booklet alongside a digital download presented on a real seed-paper card.
Half a century on, Plantasia continues to resonate - an enduring reminder of Mort Garson's ability to make the synthetic feel strangely alive and the whimsical feel oddly profound.
About Night Howl
Night Howl is a women-run production and creative agency co-founded by musician Adriana Molello and Megan Roberts, the former VP of Experiential at Atlas Obscura (2012-2024).
About Seed Song Farm
Seed Song Farm is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit farm and educational center located on 215 acres of agricultural fields, wetlands, and mature woods at the historic Old Chambers Farm site in Kingston, New York. Just minutes from downtown Kingston — yet feeling worlds away — the farm is home to gardens, indigenous plantings, BIPOC and women farming initiatives, honey bees, apple trees, a petting zoo, U-pick flowers, and a farm stand.
During Plantasia, the festival will unfold across two main areas of the property: a central hub near the garden stand featuring workshops, activities, food, and gathering spaces, alongside a main stage tucked deeper into the farm about a 10-minute walk away through the beautiful grounds. Guests will be able to explore the farm, take hay bale rides across the property, and experience the land throughout the weekend.
The farm is accessible by car, public transportation, and locally by bicycle, with onsite parking available for guests.
Garson, who trained at Juilliard and worked as a session player and arranger in the postwar decades, recorded Mother Earth's Plantasia in the mid-1970s amid a widespread cultural fascination with plant life sparked by the bestselling book The Secret Life of Plants. The album, originally distributed through a mattress retailer and a plant shop, has since become a touchstone of early Moog synthesis and ambient music.
