Plant-based Metal Avant-Gardists Botanist have seeded the new track “Mirabilis,” taken from new album “VIII: Selenotrope” out May 19, 2023 via Prophecy Productions. Listen to the track through the YouTube player below:
Botanist comment: “For ‘VIII: Selenotrope’, I wanted to limit myself to only dulcimers, drums, bass and voice“, mastermind Otrebor explains. “For the voice, I decided to have an album without any screams or harsh vocals whatsoever, and instead to rely on the whispers that speak to the listener as messages in a dreamlike state. As the album progresses, melodic choirs are increasingly introduced. These choirs, which have progressed in form and presence since I started Botanist, see their biggest role ever on ‘VIII: Selenotrope’. The song ‘Epidendrum Nocturnum’ is one of the album’s darker pieces. Its churning main section gives way to a cathartic landscape in which whispered elements underpin melodic choral paeans to flora that bloom in moonlight.“
Only a very few original metal acts are emerging from the mass of stylistically easy to label bands in each decade. Botanist are both in musical and lyrical aspects one of those unique bands that are obviously different. With his tenth full-length, “VIII: Selenotrope,” which is also his 8th solo album and the first since “VI: Flora” (2014), mastermind Otrebor again sends sprigs into new sonic directions. Although the band’s roots in Black Metal still shimmer through the dense foliage, this sprawling, straggling, blooming creation is an exuberantly growing, varied musical meditation.
The title “VIII: Selenotrope” refers to plants that flower nocturnal in the moonlight. Botanist‘s characteristic sound of the hammered dulcimer combines perfectly with now predominantly clean vocals that often arranged into multi-layered choirs entangle this highly dynamic album with its predecessors. The result is a singular piece of music that takes from all directions including Avant-Garde, Progressive, Experimental, Post-Metal, and other possible descriptions – the validity of which, very much depends on each individual listener. “VIII: Selenotrope” is not made to fit into just one drawer.
When composer, lyricist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Otrebor created the San Francisco based Botanist in 2009, he already had a specific lyrical concept in mind that has persisted to permeate all his releases until and including today.
All songs of this project are told from the perspective of a protagonist called “The Botanist.” He is characterised as a crazed man of science that lives in self-imposed exile, as far away from Humanity and its crimes against Nature as possible. In his sanctuary of fantasy and wonder, which he calls “The Verdant Realm,” “The Botanist” surrounds himself with plants and flowers to find solace in the company of the natural world, while he envisions the destruction of mankind. Seated upon his throne of Veltheimia, “The Botanist” awaits the time of humanity’s self-eradication, which will allow plants to cover planet Earth in green once again. Botanist‘s lyrics are equally informed by scientific nomenclature as they are inspired by Romantic-era poetry, art, and philosophy.
In a striking departure from traditional metal instrumentation, Otrebor uses distorted hammered dulcimers instead of guitars. This also marks Botanist as the first band to adapt magnetic pickups to hammered dulcimer, and perform on stage. Stylistically, the Americans earlier paid tribute to the mentality of some of the pioneering Scandinavian Black Metal bands’ connection to nature, before spinning the dark yarn into new sonic and emotional fabrics. To Botanist, the Black Metal trope about misanthropy and of being alone in the forest is in fact about the woods and its floral inhabitants themselves. Each named plant becomes its own character in the ever growing pantheon of the project’s “green metal” discography.
Botanist sprouted from the seed of their debut double-album “I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose from the Dead” (2011) into a tripartite sapling with the addition of “III: Doom in Bloom” (2012). From this early growth, their sprawling discography developed into several directions with two further solo-albums forming the stems: “IV: Mandragora” (2013) and “VI: Flora” (2014).
All Botanist albums bearing Roman numbers are solo-recording by Otrebor, which includes “VIII: Selenotrope.” The same applies to the EPs with an Arabic number, i.e. “EP1: The Hanging Gardens of Hell / Ode to Joy” (Split, 2013), “EP2: Hammer of Botany” (2015), and “EP3: Green Metal / Deterministic Chaos” (Split, 2016).
When the mastermind started to work with a constantly mutating line-up in studio and on stage, he adopted the marker “Collective,” which appears on the following albums, “Collective: The Shape of He to Come” (2017) and “Collective: Setlist 2017” (2017), with the later consisting out of solo material that was re-recorded with the line-up that toured Europe in 2017.
Feeling that this system led to ‘clunky’ titles, the “collective” version of Botanist released the next full-length albums under simple titles without a prefix: “Ecosystem” (2019), “Ecosystem Version B” (2020), and “Photosynthesis” (2020). “Ecosystem Version B” (2020) is an alternative version of “Ecosystem,” but with different drums, bass, mix, lyrics, titles, and with the European Tour 2017 singer on vocals.
After successfully working with Swedish mixing and mastering specialist Dan Swanö for “Photosynthesis,” Otrebor decided to continue the collaboration for “VIII: Selenotrope.” The result is a stunningly beautiful new branch in the Botanist evolution. Yet in an unexpected twist, “VIII: Selenotrope” blooms not only by night, but also shines as a radiant musical flower in broad daylight.
Formats:
“VIII: Selenotrope” will be available as a 2xCD hardcover 23-page artbook with exclusive bonus companion album and enhanced artwork, as a 2xLP Gatefold in black vinyl, and as a 2xLP Gatefold in black and gold swirl vinyl.
Purchase here: http://lnk.spkr.media/botanist-selenotrope
Tracklist:
- Against the Selenic Light
- Risen from the Rain
- Epidendrum Nocturnum
- Mirabilis
- Angel’s Trumpet
- Selenotrope
- Sword of the Night
- The Flowering Dragon
Lineup:
Otrebor / hammered dulcimer, drums, vocals, bass
Additional collective line-up (recording/live):
Daturus / drums
Tony Thomas / bass
Mar / vocals, keyboards
Krieger / dulcimer
