Records About or Inspired by Nature
Celebrating the Earth Month this April and the coming 50 years of Earth Day on 22 April, here is a selection of music albums about or inspired by nature. Hope you like it.
God Bless the Grass (1966)
by Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger’s God Bless the Grass was the first album dedicated to environmental protest songs, but it had limited impact on public sentiment and political action in comparison to his earlier work and that of other folk singer/activists -primarily because of the rise of rock music and Seeger’s marginalization from the civil rights movement.
Environments (1969–1979)
by Irv Teibel
One night, while working on a film score for the avant-garde artists Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant, Teibel found himself on Brighton Beach, recording the sound of the crashing waves. He took these tapes home and began listening to them obsessively, as though they were the most irresistible pop song ever written.
Teibel eventually left Conrad and Grant’s project, returned to the beach, and recorded hundreds of more hours for himself. He wanted to capture the sound of the “perfect” ocean. In 1969, Teibel started his own company and began releasing Environments, a series of “natural sound” recordings. Each side of an LP was devoted to a setting: the “ultimate” seashore, a warm summer night in the backwoods of eastern Pennsylvania, a Caribbean lagoon, the sound of streams and insects, birds fluttering and chirping at the Bronx Zoo, a Central Park “be-in.”
Environments, which was eventually distributed by Atlantic Records, was a surprise hit. The series dovetailed nicely with the sensibility of the late sixties and seventies. People listened to them for a variety of reasons: to relieve stress, to sleep, to understand and commune with the world around them, to test out the new advances in home stereo technology.
There are eleven series of Environments released in a span of ten years. Fifty years after its first release, all series of Environments is available as that quintessential 21st-century productivity tool: an app!
What’s Going On (1971)
by Marvin Gaye
For this album, Gaye fashioned an overarching concept that he described as an ecology. In one sense, he was speaking very specifically about the ongoing damage to our environment, but in another, he was stretching the notion of ecological issues to our larger, corrosive ways of living during that era. This concept is powerfully addressed in “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Along with “What’s Going On,” “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” was a bona fide hit single, a sorrowful lament about humanity’s ethical decay in relation to environmental catastrophe.
Sonic Seasonings (1972)
by Wendy Carlos
Released just after her scoring for Clockwork Orange, Sonic Seasonings finds Carlos stretching out her compositions into four side-long ambient tracks, each named after one of the four seasons. Carlos’ instrumental ensemble is relatively sparse, consisting of mostly crystal-clear field recordings and, of course, a mess of synthesizers. She does explore strange electronic timbres, but her real focus is on the use of the instrument as a mirror of more traditional sounds.
Mother Earth’s Plantasia (1976)
by Mort Garson
Mother Earth’s Plantasia arrived in an era where yoga, alternative spiritual practices, canyon artist communes and first-wave vegetarian restaurants were on the rise in America. Indoor plants fit perfectly, especially after fringe authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published The Secret Life of Plants in 1973, a best-selling book that made some charming, if rather pseudoscientific suggestions, including the claim that plants have abilities like telepathy, lie detecting, and intergalactic communication. Six years later, American filmmaker Walon Green adapted the book into a documentary, with an experimental soundtrack album composed by Stevie Wonder. Between these, pulp horror moments like DC Comics’ superhero Swamp Thing, and the plant pod replicants of 1978’s Invasion of The Body Snatchers, our lush-leafed, potted friends were firmly intertwined with the 70s counterculture.
Mort Garson was a composer, occultist, and early electronic music pioneer. Although he maintained a relatively low profile during his lifetime, much of Garson’s music found its way into the heart of popular culture. In 1976, Garson took Tompkins and Bird’s advice literally, recording an album of plant music as a promotional item for Mother Earth Plant Boutique. He called it Mother Earth’s Plantasia. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants and the people who love them”, in the 43 years since it was released, Mother Earth’s Plantasia has become an open secret among plant lovers, obscure record collectors, and open-format DJs. Prized for its exquisite music, with alliterated song titles like “Symphony For A Spider Plant” and “A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair”, and its adorable illustrated packaging, the album also came with an indoor plant care booklet, penned by Joel and Lynn Rapp, who were by this stage best-selling plant book authors as well. Beyond that, Mother Earth’s Plantasia was only available with the purchase of a Simmons mattress from Sears.
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979)
by Stevie Wonder
Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse.
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is a soundtrack to The Secret Life of Plants, a film inspired by the same book that inspired Wendy Carlos to write Mother Earth’s Plantasia three years earlier. Six studios would ultimately be used to produce this album. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.
Ambient 4: On Land (1982)
by Brian Eno
On Land departs from the static and the placid about as often as ambient can before ceasing to be ambient, which is what makes it the last indisputably pioneering Brian Eno album. As Eno has mapped it out here, the terrain at the borders of ambient may grab far more attention than that of Discreet Music. There are sounds and textures striking enough on their own to overcome Eno’s decision not to assemble them into any overt structure.
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (1983)
by Virginia Astley
This record’s peacefulness went much against the general grain in 1983. Daughter of TV theme composer Edwin Astley and former member of chamber-pop ensemble The Ravishing Beauties, Virginia paints what seems to be a simple portrait of a summer’s day, with piano, woodwind, voices, field recordings and electronics.
The first side was called Morning, the second Afternoon, and the delicacy of its simply arranged vignettes almost reminds me of being back in the school music room, playing the piano with a friend jamming along on the flute. It has a very childlike, English quality, reminiscent of long, hot, lazy summer days. Timeless, beautiful music.
Watermark (1988)
by Enya
In addition to the album’s watery, organic themes — ships, shores, rivers, storms, flows — the recordings are dripping wet with layered synthesizers, and voices awash in a maximal, digital aesthetic. Despite the often-derisive designation of New Age or World Beat, Watermark is a mistress-piece of sonic experimentation. And Enya is a reclusive trailblazer for women in electronic music composition.
Listening to Watermark becomes a purely acousmatic experience, wherein the literal meaning of Enya’s words — some in Latin, some in Gaelic — matters less than the placement of the voice within an intricate embroidery of sound. Enya’s is a voice proliferated and multiplied ad infinitum into abstraction — a voice without a body, post-human, technotopian, and inherently otherworldly. It’s a voice so supernatural that we want to respond to it, to talk back to it, to talk into it as if it were the wind.
Oceanic (1996)
by Vangelis
Oceanic is a collection of tone poems with Ocean themes. On this 1996 release, Vangelis creates a soothing 50 minute journey through deep oceanic spaces. The new age music showcases his wonderful ear for melodies and lush synthetic orchestration, but does not have the edge or sense of experimentation that marks his best work.
The album starts with the sounds of surf, which recur throughout the album. The first track, “Bon Voyage”, is a bombastic orchestral electronica track. This type of music is what Vangelis is best known for, beautiful melodies, lushly orchestrated with synthesizers. “Bon Voyage” is Vangelis at his grand melodic best.
Plastic Beach (2010)
by Gorillaz
Reportedly, Albarn was inspired by all of the plastic he saw on the beach around his house, but he knew that listeners would probably not respond well to an overtly environmentalist message. Therefore, he also aimed to make Plastic Beach “one the most pop records” he’s ever done — “capturing (listeners’) imagination” and exuding “fun” from start to finish — but with enough “depth” and “environmental thoughts scattered and peppered around every bit of (it).” On Hewlett’s end, he wanted to bring a bit more wisdom and maturity to the animated quartet’s ethos and surroundings.
The eco-minded audience will love this album and its environmental message, especially here when 2D sings, “It’s all good news now, because we left the taps on for ten whole years”. Sailing away from Plastic Beach you wonder what will become of the place and whether we will ever hear more from its inhabitants. But there’s not denying that the tales and characters which make up “the most deserted spot on the planet” are both entertaining and unique.
One strange “fact” about this album is that it’s concept, musically and thematicaly, was mainly conceived by Murdoc with only a little input from his other bandmate, 2D.
Biophilia (2011)
by Björk
Björk is a visionary and her album Biophilia is an expedition into the creative canyon between science and technology. Conceived out of a simple interest in the relationship between the nature and sound, like a rapidly evolving organism itself, the scale of the project multiplied from there. Academics and multimedia designers were consulted. Instruments were invented (including a synthesizer that plays lightning). Three years later, the result is not only Björk’s most musically elaborate record to date, but the first in history to be released in a constellation of iPad/iPhone apps.
Biophilia inspired many people from multidisciplinary background to eventually founded Biophilia Education Project. This large-scale project is backed by the Icelandic Ministry for Education, Science & Culture and is based around creativity as a teaching and research tool, where music, technology and the natural sciences are linked together in an innovative way.
