THE UNEXPLAINED

To me I think Mort Garson is one of the great synthesizer pioneers, although a lot of it got bogged down by cheesy narration and dated subject matter such as The Zodiac - Cosmic Sounds, The Wozard of Iz and the Signs of the Zodiac series (which actually, I don't have a problem with, though many do), so you often had to tune out the narration to hear the brilliant music within. Luckily he did a few all instrumental Moog albums, like Lucifer - Black Mass and it's natural followup The Unexplained, which is the album I'm reviewing here. As usual, his name is not emphasized on his albums, you usually never see his name on the front cover, and this time it's no exception, he was going by Ataraxia for this particular project. Unsurprisingly this also sounds like that natural followup to Black Mass. To me, this is an even better album, although still trippy, he wasn't doing trippy sounds effects for sound effects sake and often took a bit more of a melodic approach, although it's not like he's heading in Jean Michel Jarre territory here. He only released one more Moog album, Plantasia in 1976, and I don't believe he recorded anything more like this. Certainly The Unexplained is a great album of electronic music, and even if you were put off by some of his other releases (for reasons explained near the beginning of this review), this still comes highly recommended!