One of the Bay Area’s most interesting bands, BOTANIST, is excited to announce its sixth chronological release. Titled VI: Flora, this 11-song full-length album is a progression from the misanthropic masterplans of the destruction of mankind at the hands of plants as detailed on the project’s last two albums: 2012’s III: Doom In Bloom and 2013’s IV: Mandragora. Now, VI: Flora focuses on the wondrous beauty of the plants themselves through a gauzy haze of dream-like sound with the voice of The Botanist acting as spectral underpinning to the reverie.
BOTANIST is an avant-garde musical project that is the world’s first band to use distorted hammered dulcimers as its primary instrumentation. The experimental music further delves into esoterica with a harmonium and a 12-string bass guitar, propelled by unusual drumming that often features highly atypical time signatures and rhythm shifts. The albums tell the story of a botanist gone mad at witnessing the destruction of the natural environment at the hands of man. He retreats into a hermitage, surrounding himself with the natural world. In this Verdant Realm, he awaits for the day when humanity will eradicate itself, which will allow for the utopia of flora and fauna to eventually reclaim the earth. The content of BOTANIST’s songs are a combination of scientific botanical empiricism and the poetic, romantic perception of someone who is deeply moved by the forms of the primordial, mysterious aspect of the natural world. In the world of BOTANIST, nature is the most tangible representation of the divine, and is treated as such. While Botanist’s story is negative and misanthropic on the surface, it is an allegory of warning to a world out of balance: respect the natural world and all living things, or else the natural world will wipe you out and move on. The element of hope lies in the possibility of a changing of worldview, or at the very least the ideal that the world will right itself eventually, whether that includes humanity or not.
Here is a track from their recent EP: