Mort Garson Listening Party
Amoeba San Francisco - July 20th @ 5:00pm
Amoeba Music and Sacred Bones invite you to an advanced listening party on a very special date: July 20th, the anniversary of the moon landing and composer Mort Garson’s birthday!
Come on down to Amoeba SF on July 20th at 5pm and listen to Garson's Journey to the Moon and Beyond a day before its official reissue! Albums will be available for purchase at the listening party. Attendees will get a 12x12 album print of Journey to the Moon and Beyond and a Mort Garson bumper sticker, only while supplies lasts. There will also be a raffle after we play the album for a special bundle: a Mort Garson tote bag, a Moog on the Moon patch, and a Journey to the Moon and Beyond sticker!
More Info:
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. 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) alongside some 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.
