Botany
The latest from Botany, oka Spencer Stephenson; press photo courtesy of the artist.
Providing some transcendental music for your weekend to help open up your consciousness, we are proud to present the world premiere for Botany’s “Needam / Wish To” featured off the album Deepak Verbera available now from Western Vinyl. Fort Worth by Austin artist Spencer Stephenson took on jazz percussion in his studies after growing up in a household of musicians that would lead him later in life to work with contemporaries like Father John Misty, Heems, Mndsgn, milo, Open Mike Eagle, Balmorhea, Benoit Pioulard, and countless more. Trading his jazz studies for sampling newfound sounds and the like, Spencer described for his approaches. “I spent most of my time there opening the top of the piano to pluck the strings with my fingers, or scraping vibraphone bells with a cello bow, really anything I could find to create interesting sounds that were kind of atypical to me at the time.” Releasing his Western Vinyl debut in 2011, and gradually becoming one of Austin’s top creative luminaries; Deepak Verbera is an exercise in further elaborations on the aforementioned creative notions.
On the grand debut of Botany’s “Needam / Wish To” all the jazz elements introduced by Stephenson’s father & the more electronic aspects informed by his older brother’s d & b pursuits intersect together like a gallery collection that mixes sophisticated percussion with found sound captures of wind chimes and an ambient air that is heard & felt throughout the track. Brass instruments are introduced late in the rich mix, as does Spencer’s own sparse vocals that appear toward the end of the instrumental movements that constantly oscillate between the arenas of the electronic and the acoustic avenues of the natural order. Everything percolates together as Stephenson takes on the role of part shaman, part clergy & part chef that cooks up an array of audio items that are stewed together in a creative jambalaya to assuage the senses. “Go and leave me if you wish to….” sings a mysterious voice at the song’s conclusion while strings and fluttering muted horns slowly turn down the stove-top dial from a boil to slow steeping simmer. “Needam / Wish To” is the kind of unexpected abstract number that will quickly find a residence in your mind before you even realize that it has already burrowed it’s way to the frontal lobes. Join us now for our lively conversation with Botany’s own Spencer Stephenson.
Tell us about the origins of Botany & reasons behind the floral choice for the name.
I started on drums and guitar in elementary school and when my friends and I formed bands I quickly realized that I didn’t want to have much to do with what they were interested in musically. I was more interested in producing, because the aesthetic I remember hearing in my head just couldn’t be done acoustically. So I wanted to produce, I just didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, this was like 1999 to 2003. My brother had a really basic drum machine and my dad had an old rack-mount guitar looper and a multi-FX box so I’d just loop stuff up and play my dad’s guitar to it, I was much happier making music alone with that setup. Totally insular.
DAWs and bit-torrenting both entered everyone’s lives around 2004 so I started reverse-engineering my favorite hip hop stuff with pirated software, which is also when I started sampling records, and I started layering instrumentation over what I’d build out of all that, and the whole thing just started melting together into an aesthetic over the years. It’s kind of a kitchen-sink project. There’s no specific impetus for the project outside of my own musical exploration.
In 2009 I was playing drums in a band that was on Western Vinyl and passed some recordings on to the label. They signed me and put out my first thing in 2010 and I titled it Botany. I wanted a name that was a single word with a lot of imagery and I think I found that. At that time I spent a lot of afternoons walking around an actual botanic garden and I think that might have put the word in my head, but I never really intended any cheesy puns or analogies to be made for how my music sounds. That all makes me cringe a little. I just like the word. Botany students hit up my Facebook page all the time asking me to identify plants. I don’t fucking know, guys. Looks like a flower to me.
Describe how creating the album Deepak Verbera personally & creatively affected you.
I feel great about this album in my own heart and mind. I love the format of “beats” but it can be confining and trope-y and I resent having my creative voice only be compared to the most visible people in the genre instead of on its own merit which tends to happen more with beats. So hip-hop drums have always been front and center in my music and it was incredibly liberating to literally rip that sound apart. I use drums on this album purely as a texture instead of as a timekeeper.
Plus my record collection at home skews toward ambient, and I felt that I was sidelining that influence on my previous records. It was always a type of thing where the more spacious parts of my albums were relegated to interludes even though they were typically my favorite pieces on the records. Those are almost always the most interesting parts of any record to me. The last albums put forward beats as part of some statement I felt was necessary at the time, but I’ve moved away from that and I’m really happy to do so. The so-called interludes are now the whole record, as they should be. That feels right to me. When I come back to beats I want them to be much more impressionistic than just “kick, snare, kick, snare” whatever the fuck.
Walk us by the hand through the wonderland-whirlwind that is “Needam / Wish To”, and describe how this was created & inspired.
This one of only two tracks on the album with an actual tempo and it’s only there in the first half of the track. It’s funny to call it a wonderland, because I rarely make tracks directly out of anger and this is one of them. It starts softly, I must have been in a calmer state when I started it. Everything kind of trickles in slowly in the first half, but when it hits the halfway point the drums land really hard and just start kicking aimlessly.
I think the whole track is me throwing my hands up at the frustrations I was experiencing in my life at that time, being broke while being overworked, having trouble in my relationship, feeling like there’s no end to the barrage of modern bullshit I had to contend with on a daily basis. The first half of the title “Needam” comes from “Need a minute.” I was drowning in modern life and was tired of what felt like a giant hand pressing down on me all the time. So when those drums come in that’s a little bit of a rebuttal, like shoving it all off and swinging back at it.
Towards the end of the song a clip of an old folk traditional ballad is buried in the background, saying “go and leave me if you wish to,” which is where the second half of the title comes from. That didn’t pertain to my relationship in the way the original folk song may have intended, but to whatever dark forces I felt weren’t letting me elevate or move forward in my life and happiness. It was me telling them off. Those traditional ballads were written by tired people with hard lives who died young and often. It worked well as a hyperbole for how I felt at the time.
What’s awesome right now in both Austin & Forth Worth that few know about, but perhaps the world should?
I don’t much of what’s going on in Fort Worth, I don’t play a lot of shows there. I grew up there but I never found a lot of footing in the scene. I don’t think the local writers even know I’m from there.
My favorite thing in North Texas right now is DAMN which is an acronym for Dallas Ambient Music Nights. It’s a monthly event that showcases several visual projection artists and musical artists, and the word ambient functions as a catch-all genre for all these amazing Texas experimental musicians who come out of the woodwork. It might actually be my favorite thing going on in the country right now. It’s always engaging, satisfying, and calming, and that’s made more poetic by the fact that it happens in the heart of a noisy, concrete beast like Dallas.
Austin’s electronic scene is entering a heyday as far as I can forecast. The roster is deep and they’re all talented, all highly listenable. There’s been a regular event here for six years called Exploded Drawing that showcases the local beat making talent, and as a rule only original music can be played there– no remixes and no DJ sets. They have a built-in crowd and when I first moved to Austin I immediately found acceptance with the people who run and attend the event. There’s an unbroken thread between the psychedelic 60’s that Austin’s music scene has roots in, and what people are doing here with beats and electronic composition in 2016. You can hear it in the music itself, there’s an acknowledgement in there. I like being around that lineage. I feel at home.
The new Botany album album Deepak Verbera is available now from Western Vinyl.
