Dallas, Texas is not the first city you'd expect to nurture an artist who so intrepidly blends the disparate sonics of beat music, house, post-rock and psychedelia, but Botany, Spencer Stephenson, called the area home up until the release of his second album, 2013's Lava Diviner."I started out playing in garage bands, drums or guitars, but it was all just fucking around," Stephenson explains. "It was never anything I thought about being a part of for a long time. When I was 21, I joined a post-rock band and that's where I started taking instrumentation seriously, but I had been doing the computer thing alongside that. That's always where I felt like I could truly get the ideas out."Botany's new album, Dimming Awe, The Light is Raw, released on Western Vinyl tomorrow, was made largely after his move to Austin at the tail end of 2014. The move invigorated Stephenson. "There were only a couple people doing what I do in Dallas/Fort Worth, but there's actually a scene in Austin!" Stephenson says with a note of surprised glee. "People are really creative, and there are some motherfuckers here who really do it, man. It's really nice to have people around me that are on the same level."Features on the album include frequent collaborator, Brainfeeder-releasing RYAT, Chicago-based alt-rapper Milo, and was Matthewdavid, who took on mixing and mastering duties. Milo is the standout on two tracks on the LP, including "Au Revoir," the album's first single. "When I heard him, I was like: 'This is the dude," says Stephenson.The album itself is a dense and immersive work that treats genre delineations like they don't even exist as it goes from ambient to club to hip-hop, carried along through swirling soundscapes. But even though Austin has been a revelation for Botany, it's still business as usual. "I make music in this bare minimum apartment that I can afford to live in," he says, wryly. "My studio goes right out to the balcony, which overlooks an alleyway. On the right is an office building, and on the right is another apartment building. There are two dumpsters that homeless people are constantly digging through."I live around constant noise. Central Austin, somebody yelling at someone or an ambulance racing by. I feel like that constant noise has to have some effect on my music. But my music is pretty full anyway, there's a lot going on at once. Where I live now has only bolstered that more. I feel like I've been disconnected from that original idea, when I named the project Botany as a 20 year old. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing."Botany's music could be called 'introverted maximalism,' but if Spencer Stephenson continues to quietly put out such groundbreaking work, that introversion may soon be the life of the party.Botany is on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter
Advertisement