Mark Gane has never been one to rush a creative vision. With Garden Music, the co-founder of Martha and the Muffins unveils a project that’s been quietly taking root for 25 years. Born from a fascination with plant names and nurtured by his life partner, Martha Johnson, the album was brought to full bloom during the stillness of the pandemic. What’s Going On had the chance to chat with Gane about the parallels being gardening and making music, the album’s shadowy undercurrents, and the meticulous sonic world Gane has cultivated over a whopping four decades. Wow.
JG: Garden Music feels both deeply personal and otherworldly. How did you come up with the concept of doing an album about the imagined worlds of plant life?
Mark Gane: I have to give Martha Johnson a lot of credit, my life partner and co-Muffins collaborator. At least 25 years ago, she said, “With all these neat sounds that you keep coming up with, you really should do a solo album. Just pick the things that you really like to do.” And those two things were gardening and music. Painting was actually the third thing. But that didn’t make it into this project. Over a period of several decades, I started working on it.
The starting point was collecting a bunch of common plant names. These are all very inspiring in their own way. So what could I do with them? I boiled it down to about 11 and just started working from there. What would a Johnny Jump Up or Blue Mist sound like? The project then got shelved on and off over all those years for various reasons. Then in the second year of COVID, I thought, well, you know, I really should finish this or I’m going to be dead soon or whatever. So I got right down to it and finished it and then sat on it for another two years for reasons I can’t explain. I told people I was completely happy with it. It wasn’t like I had any doubts about it. I wasn’t perhaps in any great hurry, but here we are. It’s out now. It is personal. It’s not pop music. It’s maybe a reflection of my own deep interest in gardening and my sensibility around the natural world.
JG: Do you see any parallels between cultivating a garden and putting an album together?
Mark Gane: Oh, for sure. All art kind of draws upon the same skills and impulses and intuitive uh activity. Putting an album together, gardening, painting and making music and even just weeding, they all have a Zen quality that gets you a bit out of yourself and allows you to be really calm. I think that’s one of the things I really like about it, it takes me out of this insane world, which is becoming crazier and crazier. By working on this music or working in the garden, it’s a place of relative safety, and it’s more contemplative and calming. Of course, all the Buddhists and everybody have known this for gazillions of years.
JG: There are so many unique sounds on the album. How do you decide when a sound should remain raw and recognizable versus when it should be transformed or distorted into something else?
Mark Gane: Well, that’s where intuition comes in. Most of the material for this album came from my sound library, which I’ve been amassing for 40-plus years. Whenever a weird noise happened to be around, I’d record it without knowing if it would ever get used. I had vast amounts of field recordings and weird synthesizer squeaks, and people doing these strange vocals. I think the skill that happens after many years of doing this kind of music is knowing when to stop. I’ve been doing experimental music longer than I’ve been in Martha and the Muffins, so it’s a very deep and strong part of me. When I began, I had certain sensibilities that I still have, but they’re more developed now because I’m older and I have a lot more experience making music like that. I think it’s just part of the work process.
JG: The track “Deadly Nightshade” was one I kept coming back to. It feels like there’s this line between beauty and danger in that song. Do you feel like that tension is at the root of your art in general over the years?
Mark Gane: There’s definitely been a battle between the light and the dark in our music. Anybody who just listens to “Echo Beach” and thinks that’s what the band is all about, there’s a whole other thing going on with our albums. And you’re right, that’s part of it. This year, we released a YouTube presentation of some of our darker songs called Happy Dystopia 2025. And it highlights some of the darker side of Martha and the Muffins, and there’s a lot of it actually. I’m just about to finish episode two, which is called Being a Woman is Not Being a Man, which is a lyric from a song called “Act Like a Woman” or “No Man’s Land.” There were two different versions of it.
The dark songs have been running through our repertoire since the first album. If you’re a thinking human being, it’s hard not to see the dark side because if you don’t, you’re ignoring a major part of our existence. And you can choose to work with it or not, or incorporate it into your work. But certainly “Deadly Nightshade,” that’s a pretty strong, scary piece. But there’s beauty in darkness too, you know? I’m not sure where I would find the beauty in Deadly Nightshade. Unless some of the things that happen are cool in a beautiful sonic kind of way. Would you agree that it’s pretty scary?
JG: Oh, definitely. I think that almost ominous quality is sort of what drew me back to it. The track “Love Lies Bleeding” closes out the album. It’s an emotional climax, and the only track with lyrics. Did you always intend to save that moment of direct language for the end of the album to cap things off, or did that just come about organically?
Mark Gane: It did come about organically in the sense that once everything was finished, I spent a lot of time figuring out what the sequencing was going to be because all these pieces are very different. And if you have a CD, the spaces between the tracks are a bit longer than normal, just to get you out of one world and into another. When I was sequencing it, I thought, is there an arc to this whole thing? Like, how is one thing going to follow another? And for some reason, “Love Lies Bleeding” just seemed like the ending. Lyrically, it’s about an ending, too. I think it worked really well as an end piece.
When I was doing the sequencing, I decided the first song was “Blue Mist.” Because it’s almost like the voice of Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer. is introducing you to sound. She’s going “sound, sound, beautiful sound.” That seemed like an intro to this weird world. I had “Blue Mist” being the beginning and “Love Lies Bleeding” at the end. Those were the two things that made sense. And then, I had to fill in everything in between.
JG: I wanted to ask you about the use of Delia Derbyshire’s voice on “Blue Mist.” Was that just a vocal sample that appealed to you, or was it more so paying tribute to what she meant to experimental music?
Mark Gane: Probably both. I stumbled upon this interview she did in the early 2000s that was recorded by the interviewer John Cavanagh. And I thought it was fantastic. Her voice was so extreme, and apparently, she came from one of the cities in East Anglia that was bombed by the Luftwaffe. When she was growing up, she grew up with the sound of people. She talked about the sound of feet on cobblestones running for the bomb shelters and the sound of air raid sirens, and the bombs coming down. She was very astute about listening to sounds. I’ve been a huge admirer of hers. When I listened to the conversation, I said, I’ve got to use this. So, I took the conversation and I chopped it up into the parts that I liked best. I got permission from John Cavanagh, who was very gracious about it and thought it was great. He gave me all sorts of insights into Delia because he had quite a long conversation with her. It just seemed like her spirit and character were a great way to bring us into this. And “Blue Mist” seemed like her voice. Maybe she was just a blue mist at this point, you know, floating around. That’s the kind of thinking that went into this.
JG: Your work on this project, but also throughout the different iterations of Martha and the Muffins over the decades, defies easy categorization in an age where streaming platforms demand a genre label to easily place music into a box. Is being unclassifiable a strength or do you find it can be a bit of a headache having to explain to people what your sound is and how to get into it?
Mark Gane: It’s a great thing as an artist. It’s not so great when you’re confronted with the music business because one thing I’ve noticed with a lot of artists and a lot of bands, and there are some great exceptions to this, most of them don’t stray very far off what they became famous for. If we had done that as Martha and the Muffins, we would have done numerous iterations of “Echo Beach” over and over, right? When we started the band, we thought it would last for maybe two years and then we’d go back to our jobs at the art gallery or whatever. But it got legs because of “Echo Beach,” and it went on from there.
We were never interested in fame per se. It always seemed a bit banal to us. What we were interested in was being artists. That led us musically, as you’re hinting at, to all sorts of places. There was an early sort of new wave. Then we got into punk funk and then moved into more mainstream dance music. Martha did her kids’ album and a solo album. We were all over the place. On our Instagram page, we label ourselves among other things as poly genre, which is a mouthful. There might be a better way of expressing that. We were very difficult to classify, and as a result, I think in some respects our careers have suffered. A lot of people wrote us off as a one-hit wonder, which was absolutely inaccurate to begin with. I love that song, but I hate all this other stuff. You’ve got people who love our 1981 album This Is The Ice Age. But we don’t mind that. At this point, we’re used to it. Whatever happens, happens, you know?
JG: Now that Garden Music is out in the world, can we expect more solo projects from you?
Mark Gane: Well, I am encouraged. I have enough material that I was thinking, could I do Garden Music Volume 2? Which I certainly could, because I’ve got a lot of really great names left over and a lot of interesting sounds. One solo project that I’ve had in mind for about 15 years is a more conventional song-based album called Beautiful Vaughan, about a doomed love affair set against a doomed landscape. And what I mean by that is it happens in the suburbs, with hydro towers and bleak industrial landscapes. The landscape is a metaphor for what’s going on with the two people. So maybe I’ll do that first.
JG: Wow. That sounds really interesting. Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for that. Yeah, I don’t even know what to make of that.
Mark Gane: Oh, good. I like that. And maybe, that’ll encourage me to get on that now. Speed it up a bit.
Listen to Mark Gane’s new album Garden Music on Bandcamp.
