One of the Bay Area’s most interesting bands, Botanist is excited to announce their sixth sequential release. Titled VI: Flora, this eleven-song album was recorded by Otrebor in The Verdant Realm and mastered by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden. VI: Flora continues the story of The Botanist, a crazed man of science who lives in self-imposed exile, as far away from Humanity and its crimes against Nature as possible. Seated upon his throne of Veltheimia in the Verdant Realm, his sanctuary of fantasy and wonder, he surrounds himself with plants and flowers, finding solace in the company of the Natural world. While recent albums detailed a misanthropic master plan for the destruction of mankind at the hands of plants, VI: Flora focuses rather on the wondrous beauty of the plants themselves through a gauzy haze of dreamlike sound. The voice of The Botanist acts as spectral underpinning to the reverie. Botanist’s previous releases—I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose from the Dead (tUMULt, 2011), III: Doom in Bloom (TotalRust, 2012) and most recently, 2013’s IV: Mandragora (The Flenser, 2013)—have seen much critical acclaim, landing on NPR’s 25 Best Metal Albums, Metal Sucks’ Top 15 Metal Albums, Metal Injection’s Top 10 Releases, and an honorable mention on Pitchfork’s Top 40 Albums of 2011.“… music that disobeys every rule about black metal, sounds nothing like black metal, and yet can’t really be called anything but black metal. In that way, Botanist could be the fullest realization of the post-black metal concept yet, and that makes the future awfully exciting.” —The Quietus “Botanist lives up to its environmentally minded, hammered-dulcimer’d nerdery. And, not only that, but the man behind Botanist has created an alternate world where black-metal tropes—buzzing sound, croaked vocals, bleak aesthetics—exist, but are sonically limitless.” —NPR
