Mort Garson Journey To The Moon And Beyond (Compilation)

Listening to any of Mort Garson’s vast catalogue feels like being stretched between new and old worlds. The Juilliard-trained composer fell in love with technology—specifically with the world-building potential of Moog synthesisers that let him create a new library of sounds he couldn’t summon from his piano. But even as he drifted into the groovy tide of the synth-soaked 1960s, Garson refused to abandon his classical impulses, instead choosing to lash his pet alien sounds to his sturdy understanding of composition. Still, he revels in the weird, and Journey to the Moon and Beyond blends the sublime and the funky into something singular. Part of a series of Garson reissues from the experimentally inclined label Sacred Bones Records, Journey is a collection of remastered archival recordings and includes some of the artist’s best-known work. Chief among them is his remarkable score to the live CBS News broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing (“Moon Journey”), which is less a composition than an indelible audio fingerprint on a generation’s collective memory. The collection bounces across genres and influences as well, including the funky jazz suites that bookend the blaxploitation flick Black Eye and a three-part composition called “Western Dragon”, which arrives with the gentle plucks of a Chinese zither before transforming into kaleidoscopic psych rock. (All three parts of “Western Dragon” were apparently discovered without any notes, leaving it to the listener to imagine what worlds Garson was tasked with building.) Journey is Mort Garson as cosmic explorer, bounding between worlds and sending the transmissions back to Earth one Moog keystroke at a time.