Mort Garson's Signs of the Zodiac
You might recognize Garson's name from Mother Earth's Plantasia, which got a reissue recently:
I really like this album, but I think the first Mort Garson album I heard was Ataraxia - The Unexplained in 2016, which an old friend mentioned to me.
After listening to it, I looked into the rest of Garson's discography, and listened to all of it.
One other album of note was The Zodiac - Cosmic Sounds, with narration musing on aspects of each sign of the zodiac:
At the time of listening, I was going through a weird phase of my life and was coping by spiritual means; reading horoscopes, drawing a tarot card once a day, that sort of thing. The album still stands on its own, through powerful narration and interesting sound, but I was certainly drawn to it for other reasons at the time :)
And then, after this one, I found another album - or rather, twelve. It turns out, that after releasing Cosmic Sounds in 1967, Garson returned in 1969 with Signs of the Zodiac, a series of twelve albums, each focusing on one sign of the zodiac.
Here, the focus is not on the music, which serves only as backing for the narration - I would describe this series as long-form horoscopes set to electronic music.
All twelve of the albums have the same track list:
- A1 - I Know You (Sign)
- A2 - (Sign) At Work
- A3 - Planetary Motivations
- A4 - Where Was Your Moon
- B1 - (Sign) - Numbers, Gems and Colors
- B2 - In Love, (Sign)?
- B3 - The Four Seasons of (Sign)
- B4 - Those Who Knew
...and adhere to basically the same format on every track. Also, track B4 is unchanged between all of the albums. Also, for some reason A2 and A3 are switched on the Aries album only.
In terms of quality... I would say that the narration is pretty good, and the writing is striking, just like in Cosmic Sounds. However, these are still essentially horoscopes, and written in the 60s to boot. They miss the mark in certain places, at least for me... I'm not terribly interested, for instance, in what my sign brings to the workplace.
I listened to all twelve, but I would recommend you just listen to one corresponding to your sign, or whichever interests you most. Cosmic Sounds is more focused, cooler, and y'know, more music than horoscope.
Because I couldn't find high-quality, well-organized uploads of this album on youtube, I did it myself. And then when I couldn't find transcriptions of the albums online, I put up my own on Genius. Links below:
