Dana Buoy

Were you to walk into Dana Janssen’s tidy gray bungalow with the green chimney in Northeast Portland, the first thing you might notice would be the houseplants. They’re impossible, after all, not to notice. They arc from shady corners into sunlit windows. They line windowsills and lord on countertops. They dominate the bathroom’s humid climes. Ask for a plant count, and you get only a laugh.

The second thing you would surely notice — because Janssen, the longtime Akron/Family drummer who has been making kaleidoscopic pop as Dana Buoy for a decade, would surely show you — are the drums that anchor the finished basement studio. He and his partner, Jamie (the place’s real green thumb, mind you), bought the house three years ago. It was the first time Janssen had room for his primary instrument in the nine years that had passed since he arrived in Portland. Downstairs, he will play you something quick and then beam, like a proud parent of his own adult space.

Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I is Dana Janssen’s exuberant and strangely assuring synthesis of those previously parallel domestic lanes, houseplants and a home drumkit. Inspired by the flora that reign on the ground floor and Mort Garson’s endlessly pleasing Plantasia, and conceived in the basement beneath, these 12 pieces of luxuriant pop — rooted in Steely Dan and synthesizer strata, Afrobeat energy and astral harmonies, Robert Hunter koans and righteous horns — offer new mantras for and prospective maps of our complicated lives. “From nest we fall in no time at all,” Janssen coos at one point over incisive funk. “Know that I got you, I got you.” If you worry about any New Age tedium to a record inspired by photosynthesis, don’t: Janssen wants you to sing along with what he’s learned.