Day 282: Mort Garson – Journey to the Moon and Beyond
Reader, today I am going through it. Not in any sort of a serious way, just in a way where I feel like cosmically someone somewhere is testing my limits a little and I need to take extra care to not get bogged down. I need jolly music to create a jolly mood, I need to bring in the big guns, so I’m putting on the previous blog favourite Mort Garson.
Album cover courtesy of Sacred Bones
I wrote about Moog wizard and all-round cool guy Mort Garson on day 206 when I fell in love with his plant album Mother Earth’s Plantasia and again on day 210 when I covered his occult project Ataraxia, both of which are among some of the most top-tier things I’ve discovered in the course of this project, so today I thought I’d explore his Journey to the Moon and Beyond.
Despite writing about his music twice, I haven’t really written about Mort Garson yet, which is strange because he’s got some lore. He studied at Julliard and worked as a session musician, until he got called into being an army medic in World War II. When he returned, he went right back to music. He made background music for films, composed the Ruby & the Romantics classic “Our Day Will Come” and was an arranger on a number of recordings, including “Guantanamera” by the Sandpipers and "Be True to Me" by Doris Day.
His life changed when he discovered the Moog synthesiser. He was at the L.A. Audio Engineering Society Convention when he met Robert Moog and saw the instrument in action, immediately spending about $50,000 on one of the first Moog’s ever made. It landed him all the way to the moon, as Journey to the Moon and Beyond is centred around “Moon Journey”, the song that he composed to accompany the CBS News live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
People originally thought that the recording of the song had been lost and only appeared in an old YouTube video, but it was eventually found in some archives, and it made its way to the 2023 compilation album Journey to the Moon and Beyond. Garson himself unfortunately died in 2008, but the album was compiled from his unreleased songs, including songs that he created as a film called Black Eye and a song he’d composed for a National Geographic special.
The album is a good overview into Mort Garson, but unfortunately the fact that it’s a compilation album does take away from the enjoyment of it slightly, as it hops from one place to another and never really stays in one spot for long enough for you to really get into the very specific soundscapes that he builds. But that only means that it’s not as good as other things I’ve heard by Mort Garson, not that it’s not a fun album to listen to.
Amid my favourites on the album is the incredible “Disco UFO (Pt II)”, released by Mort Garson as Captain D.J., which is a project I wish he had pursued a bit more because in all of its cheesiness, it’s delightfully out there. The variation in what he was doing is wild, and his musical output is so full of whimsy that it’s easy to forget that the guy is actually an electronic music pioneer. But the greatest part of the album is of course “Moon Journey”, not only as a part of music history but also just as history.
It’s a cool collection of songs, but more for the Mort Garson superfans rather than the new explorers like me. I’ll try his zodiac albums next I think, or maybe the occult one I haven’t heard yet. For me, this is a 7.5/10.