A dispatch from this year’s Plantasia

What exactly is “plant music”? It’s a frequency, a state of mind, and a ’70s subgenre — based on a book, 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants, that claimed plants are sentient, telepathic even, and like music — all at once. Earlier this month, Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory & Gardens honored that with another year of Plantasia. Taking place inside and on the lawn over two days, a smattering of artists brought style, substance, and deeply meditative chill to the city’s West Side.

Tracing back to 2018 as a celebration of Mort Garson’s album of the same name, the festival has only continued to grow into a wide palette of sound that’s enhanced by greenery. This year, it coincided with the 50th anniversary of Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a twinkling collection of songs made on a Moog synthesizer that turned from dollar-bin novelty to DJ secret to bona fide cult classic. Somehow, the vinyl was only sold at Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles or handed out for free with the purchase of a Simmons mattress from Sears in the ’70s. If you collect records, you’ve seen its whimsical cover and tagline (“Warm earth music for plants… and the people who love them”) or been wrapped up in its lore — long out of print until Sacred Bones, a festival partner, reissued it in 2019.

Upon entering the grounds, the album plays unobtrusively in the background to greet the people and lift them into a zen headspace. Straight up, Plantasia was unlike any event that I’ve ever been to, offering a spaciousness and leisurely pace nonexistent at other festivals. It shares DNA with Big Ears — its neighbor to the southeast — in that the performances inspire, and often require, attentive listening.

That was apparent in Jeremiah Chiu, a Chicago-bred composer whose work stretches across art, design, and education but stays grounded in modular synth. You may recognize him as a member of SML, a trance-y improv group that seem bound to headline in a year or two, or from the trio of way-out albums he’s made with violist Marta Sofia Honer, but at Plantasia, Chiu arrived with no backing band in sight. Standing in front of a tangle of wires and knobs, he took us through songs from his upcoming album, Edge Conditions, on the Greenhouse Lawn Stage, elevated by visuals from Alex Pelly. From the songs I heard, Edge Conditions is an intricate, inherently rhythmic collection that borrows from ’90s-era Warp, Chicago post-rock (Tortoise, Chicago Underground), and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Each connected like magnets, shifting between heady and body-shaking as kaleidoscopic shapes unfolded behind him. “Plants like to dance, too,” he said before the last song, pulling the crowd into a stomping jam that could’ve sustained us for another half-hour.

Earlier in the day, on the same stage, james K set the tone in her own eccentric style. She did the impossible: translating her nocturnal, subterranean club songs into a set that worked in bleaching sunlight. Alone onstage with a laptop, the artist proved her remarkable ear and ability to bridge worlds, moving through trip-hop, D&B, dream pop, even hints of ambient. Her delicate, mystic voice rippled through the grounds, drawing a dense audience as the performance went on. It was sincerely mesmerizing — the type of music where you can lie flat on your back and float.

Throughout the festival, you’re encouraged to wander around and connect. On Thursday, my group stumbled upon the interstellar jazz of Blue Earth Sound just by following the sound. We only stayed for a few songs, but the grooves were deep, the crowd alive, and the atmosphere pure. There’s real tenderness and Midwestern politeness to a gathering like this. People wait until a song’s over to plot their exits, duck when they cross in front of the stage, and post up on blankets, quietly stoned. The most panicked I ever felt was of my own making, when I lost my group and circled the Fern Room on a 10mg edible, soundtracked to “fire sword music” (as a friend described with blazing accuracy). We promptly reconnected five minutes later.

On Friday evening, Makaya McCraven ended the festival on a high with a hometown set that embodied Plantasia’s core: a balance between something futuristic and intensely human. Garson’s electronic songs were intended to help plants grow, but McCraven’s whole approach is growing the sound itself. In the studio, the drummer uses “beat science” — a technique where he records improvised jams with a rotating cast of musicians, then chops them up. Later, he takes those arrangements on the road with a live band and reinvents them again, spawning further ideas for future sessions. That makes the “songs,” if you can call them that, basically unrecognizable, alien even.

“What I am looking for are magical moments, particularly in the live space,” McCraven said in 2020, after synthesizing this process. He understands that they are fleeting and meant to be experienced when your attention is primed to receive, absorb, and feel them. Throughout its hour-somewhere duration, it was an unending “magical moment,” where it wasn’t clear where one song stopped and another began, except when the audience clapped. A friend said I was so immersed in his set that I barely moved, spellbound, and I have no footage on my phone to jog my memory — which is why I know it was supremely good.

Bathed in pink light, the set was worlds away from the one I caught at the Cleveland Museum of Art in February. He was still playing with trumpeter Marquis Hill and bassist Junius Paul, but the addition of Matt Gold, whose guitar solos saturated the City Garden Stage with color, made the experience transcendent. Of all the moments, the one that stands out to me happened toward the end — a montage of different people saying, “I think art is the absence of fear.” A Quasimoto voice, possibly Harry Belafonte, whose 1955 Studs Terkel interview begins 2022’s In These Times. Because of that very freedom, his sound is always morphing, always opening up to new possibility. By the end, he brought us all down to earth.

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