BOTANIST ink deal with Prophecy Productions

**BOTANIST**
sign deal with
**PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS**
and announce reissues

Post-black metal experimentalists BOTANIST have inked an album deal that is written entirely in the Latin language with Prophecy Productions. The Americanproject from San Francisco, CA headed by founder, multi-instrumentalist, and singer Otrebor will release their catalogue and the forthcoming tenth full-length via the label.

Reissues will start with vinyl editions of the first threeBOTANIST full-lengthrecordings, which is a the first time that the double-debut appears in that format: “I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose From the Dead” (2011), and “III: Doom in Bloom” (2012). All three albums will also be made available in a luxurious 5CD artbook edition under the title “Encyclopedia Botanica, Vol. 1: The Rise of Azalea”, which has been scheduled for release on December 9, 2022. The artbook edition also contains the CD “Allies” from the “III Sessions”, which features other bands making songs with drums from the “III” sessions, an additional CD with the “Live Rehearsal Demo 2013”, and the “El Rio 2013” DVD featuring BOTANIST‘s first live show

BOTANIST comment: “”Prophecy Productions intersects art with not only metal but also other musical genres that all fit together in a tasteful, well-curated vision”, mastermind Otrebor states. “For an ‘outsider,’ ‘adjacent’ metal band like Botanist, the label is therefore a great choice.”

BOTANIST are different. When composer, lyricist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Otrebor created the San Francisco based band in 2009, he already had a specific lyrical concept in mind that has persisted to permeate all releases until and including today.

The songs of this project are told from the perspective of a protagonist called “The Botanist”, who is characterised as a crazed man of science that lives in self-imposed exile, as far away from Humanity and its crimes against Nature as possible. In his sanctuary of fantasy and wonder, which he calls “The Verdant Realm”, “The Botanist” surrounds himself with plants and flowers to find solace in the company of the natural world, while he envisions the destruction of mankind. Seated upon his throne of Veltheimia, “The Botanist” awaits the time of humanity’s self-eradication, which will allow plants to cover planet Earth in green once again. BOTANIST‘s lyrics are equally informed by scientific nomenclature as they are inspired by Romantic-era poetry, art, and philosophy.

BOTANIST are different also in musical terms. In a striking departure from traditional metal instrumentation, Otrebor uses distorted hammered dulcimers instead of guitars. This also makes BOTANIST the first band to adapt magnetic pickups to hammered dulcimer, and perform on stage. Stylistically, the Americans pay tribute to the mentality of some of the pioneering Scandinavian black metal bands’ connection to nature, before spinning the dark yarn into new sonic and emotional fabrics. To BOTANIST, the black metal trope about misanthropy and of being alone in the forest is in fact about the woods and its floral inhabitants themselves. Each named plant becomes its own character in the ever growing pantheon of the project’s “green metal” discography.

BOTANIST sprouted from the seed of their debut double-album “I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose from the Dead” (2011) into a tripartite sapling with the addition of “”III: Doom in Bloom”” (2012). From this early growth, their sprawling discography developed into several directions with two further solo-albums forming the stems: “IV: Mandragora” (2013) and “VI: Flora” (2014).

All BOTANIST albums bearing Roman numbers are solo-recording by Otrebor. The same applies to the EPs with an Arabic number, i.e. “EP1: The Hanging Gardens of Hell / Ode to Joy” (Split, 2013), “EP2: Hammer of Botany” (2015), and “EP3: Green Metal / Deterministic Chaos” (Split, 2016).

When the mastermind started to work with a constantly mutating line-up in studio and on stage, he adopted the marker “Collective”, which appears on the following albums, “Collective: The Shape of He to Come” (2017) and “Collective: Setlist 2017” (2017), with the later consisting out of solo material that was re-recorded with the line-up that toured Europe in 2017.

Feeling that this system led to ‘clunky’ titles, the “collective” version of BOTANIST released the next full-length albums under simple titles without a prefix: “Ecosystem” (2019), “Ecosystem Version B” (2020), and “Photosynthesis” (2020). “Ecosystem Version B” (2020) is an alternative version of “Ecosystem”, but with different drums, bass, mix, lyrics, titles, and with the European Tour 2017 singer on vocals.

Currently, BOTANIST are preparing for the recording of their tenth full-length.