Plants are living things too, right? So why shouldn’t they get music just like the rest of us? That’s the goal of artist Peter Coffin, who began his Music For Plants art series in 2002. Inspired by a quacky 1973 book The Secret Life Of Plants that speculated that plants were sentient beings, he started to recruit artists like Sonic Youth, Ariel Pink, Animal Collective’s Deakin and Geologist, and Yoko Ono to record music that these plants could experience. The artists recorded in a greenhouse and those recordings were collected into two volumes, with a third one on the way. Some of the tracks from these compliations have surfaced over the years — the AnCo one showed up online last year and Ariel Pink’s in 2011 — but Coffin has put all of them online to promote his Red Bull Studios art exhibition Living, which is currently running in New York City. You can listen to the first two volumes below, including a Sonic Youth track that’s never surfaced on the internet previously.

Volume 1:

Volume 2:

A third volume featuring tracks from Kelela, Arto Lindsay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Teengirl Fantasy will be released this fall.

(via Pitchfork)