Botany (musician)

Spencer Stephenson (born June 1988), known for the musical project Botany, is a producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. Originally from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, he is now based in Austin, Texas where most of his output has been created.

Early life[edit]

Stephenson grew up near Fort Worth, Texas in the town of Weatherford, Texas.^[1] Beginning with the drums, he started playing instruments at an early age, and began experimenting on instruments belonging to his father and older brother^[2], eventually finding production through Software cracking. Stephenson studied jazz drumming for a year and a half in college.

Career[edit]

During a stint in a Denton, Texas post-rock and electroacoustic outfit called Sleep whale in 2009, two of Stephenson’s early recordings were featured on Pitchfork (website)|Pitchfork’s now-defunct Forkcast column under the name Abacus.^[3] Stephenson released his debut EP “Feeling Today” on Austin, Texas based label Western Vinyl in September 2010. Upon signing to the label, Stephenson chose the name Botany while frequenting the Fort Worth Botanic Garden|Fort Worth Botanic Gardens. The EP was re-released on vinyl LP in 2011.

Stephenson contributed two productions to Lushlife's 2012 album Plateau Vision, one of which features guest vocalist Heems.

Stephenson moved his recording equipment to secluded farmland outside of Austin, Texas to create his debut LP record, 2013's "Lava Diviner (Truestory)".^[4] That same year, Stephenson released a collaborative track with Father John Misty titled "Laughtrack"^[5], and contributed official remixes for Heems^[6] and Dogbite.^[7]

In 2015, Stephenson released his sophomore LP "Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw",^[8] which featured guest vocalists Milo (musician) (aka R.A.P. Ferreira) and Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid.

In 2016, Stephenson released the album "Deepak Verbera", which pivoted stylistically from the beat-heavy sound of his earlier albums toward spiritual jazz, Ambient music, psychedelic rock, and kosmische^[9]. In addition to placing "Deepak Verbera" on their list of “the 50 best albums of 2016”^[10], FACT Magazine also listed Botany as one of the “11 acts you can’t miss” at the 2017 iteration of Roskilde at which Stephenson performed^[11].

January 2017 saw the release of "Raw Light II", a companion to 2015’s "Dimming Awe, the Light is Raw"^[12].

In 2018, Stephenson and Raj Haldar (aka Lushlife) released a self-titled album under the name The Skull Eclipses. The album dealt with dark, socio-political themes, and sought to bring electronic styles like Jungle music, breakbeat, Drum and bass, Trip hop, and electronic ambient, into the context of contemporary Hip hop^[13]. In addition to rap vocals by Lushlife, it featured guest appearances from Laraaji, Open Mike Eagle, Lojii, Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors, and Dallas avant-pop outfit Def Rain^[14]. The duo performed at the Low End Theory weekly event at The Airliner in Los Angeles shortly before the event was discontinued^[15][16].

In early 2020, Sydney label Longform Editions released a thirty-minute piece by Stephenson called "Fourteen 45 Tails" which was composed by looping the run-out groove of several 45 record at once^[17][18]. In the fall of 2020, Stephenson released "End the Summertime F(or)ever", an instrumental concept album that explores socioeconomic and political frustrations amid the onset of climate change as conveyed through snippets of Spoken word|spoken-word samples that appear strategically throughout^[19][20].

Stephenson is an alum of the Red Bull Music Academy having attended and played Bonnaroo Music Festival as part of their invite-only Bass Camp series in 2016^[21].

In August 2021, the band The Octopus Project announced via social media that Stephenson had become a member of their live group.

Personal life[edit]

Stephenson has alluded to holding Humanism and Buddhism worldviews. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with his partner Denise with whom he has a son.

Style and influences[edit]

Stephenson’s music has been largely centered around sample-heavy instrumental hip-hop, but it stylistically references a wide range of sub-genres including Drone music, Ambient music, spiritual jazz, psychedelic rock, neo-psychedelia, beat music, House music, post-rock, krautrock or kosmische, and Folk music. Vice Media has referred to his compositional style as “introverted maximalism", while a 2019 Talkhouse feature referred to him as an “ambient psych composer”^[22].

John Morrison of NPR described Stephenson’s music to NPR’s Robin Hilton in a September 2020 episode of All Songs Considered, saying that it “has a lot of dark, drum-heavy beats, but [Stephenson] contrasts that with these really beautiful moments of bright, utopian psychedelia.” Morrison continues, “it’s kind of like a contemporary update of this collage-like hip hop production style that we know from Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad, DJ Shadow, The Avalanches… All those influences are there, but [Stephenson] really puts a beautiful and unique spin on that.”^[23]

Regarding this sample-based style, Stephenson himself has said “I started out writing full arrangements on guitar as a kid, and making a song out of samples feels no different to me, in fact it’s more fulfilling. I choose which elements of what I’m sampling fit best into a song, the same way I’d select chords or tones as a guitarist, and rhythms as a drummer. I rarely feel that I’m sampling something that’s outside of my own capability to play on any instrument with the exception of horns or strings. To me, sampling is about a wider curation process than traditional musicianship can provide. The timbral, textural, and tonal array of sampling opens itself up far beyond what anything that a single instrumentalist can do on his or her own in a bedroom.”^[24]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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