Bleep

1975’s The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions Of The Occult) is an example of the darker side of Mort Garson’s synthesizer music sound. Much like the Black Mass LP he put out under the name of Lucifer four years prior to The Unexplained, this record finds Garson adopting a new moniker - in this case Ataraxia - and journeying into a realm of occult sonics and brooding synthetic tones.

Some of the tracks here stick closely to the keyboard-based work that many people know and love Garson for - albeit also coming with a distinctly more outer-edges flavour than, say, Mother Earth’s Plantasia. On tunes such as ‘Tarot’ and ‘Cabala’ twiddling keyboard runs coalesce to create rich, slightly proggy pieces. ‘Astral Projection’ and The Unexplained’s title-track bring these together with programmed drum backing to invoke what was happening in much television library music at the time.

The album’s more abstract moments are those where The Unexplained makes good on the promise of its subtitle most clearly. There is an air of uncanniness to the icy Moog tones of ‘I Ching’ and ‘Sorceror’ which more than fit the description of Electronic Musical Impressions Of The Occult, and the positively unsettling ‘Seance’ invokes some classic avant-garde film scoring with its murky textures and ghoulish lead lines.

A remastered edition of The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions Of The Occult), the 1975 album that Mort Garson released under the name Ataraxia, brings out the otherworldly qualities of this uncanny electronic music.