Dinner Music 76: The weekly lineup
music for plants, desert dreamscape, so much moog
This week the sound is for plants. A few days ago, I was in line at the grocery store and chatting with the woman behind me about plants. I was lamenting how difficult keeping my plants alive in the capricious Texas weather is and she said, “You must go out to talk to your plants everyday. They can hear you.” As we enter into this next season with longer days, here are some songs, many instrumental, for calm and new days.
We begin with Step on Step, a collection on previously unreleased demos from legendary R&B producer Charles Stepney. Though there is plenty of his maximal legacy present in the sounds, this collection is something more understated, even charming. We stay understated with Molly Lewis’s enchanting and original album On the Lips, which immediately sends you to a soft, velvet lounge — martini in hand. For a sensual and transporting experience by a self-described “whistler,” start here. We move into an album from one of the main characters of the “golden age of Italian library music”: Sandro Brugnolini. The album, which is technically a soundtrack, is expansive, with dark, wah-wah psychedelia woven into exotic percussion over free-flowing jazz arrangements. The film was a two-part thriller and the accompanying sound is no less than the same — a thrilling mix of charming library and sonic avant-gardism. I would be remiss to talk about music for plants without talking about Mort Garson, the father, the king, of plant music. Mother Earth’s Plantasia is a cult album of charming, space-age sounds, created entirely on a Moog synthesizer. If you’ve never heard this album before, you must listen to it immediately. We end with New Age album Traces of Time, an album with an unusual hybrid of synthesizers and woodwind instruments that blend to create something at once interstellar and earthbound.
Enjoy.