Under the moniker “Lucifer”, composer Mort Garson released the album “Black Mass” in 1971. With song titles like “Incubus”, “Philosopher’s Stone”, and “Voices of the Dead (The Medium),” he paired his virtuosic explorations of Moog synthesis with imagery of the occult, witchcraft & Satanic worship. While he is most remembered today for the bewitchingly odd and innocent “Mother Earth’s Plantasia”, an album intended for plant listening, Garson’s “Black Mass” illuminates his playful, blasphemous spirit with sounds incredibly prescient for its release date.
The version of “ESP” currently available on streaming services accounts for the first half of the original record’s “Witch Trial”. This section is prototypical Mort Garson pop, spacious and echoing frequencies abound. With white-noise shakers accounting for the majority of its percussion, the synthesized lead takes center stage, twisting upwards and circling itself in dizzy, unbothered melodies.
Silence. An eruption of discordant, flickering drones washed in a flange. A sort of hell.
It’s over too quickly, leaving us only with an impression of witnessing something best left alone.
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About the Curator - Psetta
Psetta is a Los-Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist & musician. Hailing from rural Maine, he curated two community radio shows for several years, flirting with mundane, innovative & surreal sounds.
He runs a biweekly submission-friendly playlist with So Fertile, “summer but I don’t like heat”, covering upcoming, obscure, and quintessential Lo-Fi, Electronic, Dream Pop, Ambient, & Experimental music.
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Zanmi kanmarad – Claudette et Ti Pierre
24 March 2020
“Zanmi kanmarad” was first released in 1979 on Claudette et Ti Pierre’s second Macaya Records album, Camionette. Information on the duo themselves beyond Discogs’ dedicated archivist community proved to be more difficult to piece together…
