Botany - Raw Light II

Pitchfork 69

The music made by Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) has an air of psychedelic spirituality. Stephenson has toyed with narrative frameworks to bolster this impression: His third album, an instrumental project released last year called Deepak Verbera, was presented as a continuation of the 20th-century work of an Argentinian metaphysical researcher named Horris E. Campos. Except, it’s not entirely clear that Campos was real. “Horris is kind of my Ziggy Stardust, a character that I feel like I channel music through in some way,” Stephenson told FACT Magazine a few months ago.

As Botany, Stephenson builds his production like a loose-handed collage artist. He doesn’t interlock his samples—obscure and unexpectedly funky loops, religious chanting, Eastern psychedelic sounds—so much as neatly pile them atop one another, setting into motion paralleling trajectories. Sometimes Stephenson’s beats seem to end in two different places, resolving separate beginnings. The former jazz drummer has also become increasingly indifferent to consistent percussion, often letting his creations meander with a casual disregard for traditional structure that borders on ambient.

Raw Light II is Stephenson’s fourth album as Botany, but he’s billed it as a follow-up and companion piece to his sophomore record Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw. Both albums were mastered by the L.A. beat scene mainstay and Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid, but the new one is a little shorter and entirely instrumental, skipping out on the welcome vocal appearances of the original. Stephenson’s beats are certainly busy enough to stand alone and command their own attention, and they just as frequently demand some patience.

Stephenson often barely avoids cacophony, but seems to revel in his nearness to the effect. At the middle of “Yon,” Stephenson strips away everything but a throbbing bottom-end kick, maybe just to splay out the absurd intrigue of the sounds he’s lifting. Is that a cow mooing? Suddenly it sounds perfectly nice underneath an anxious shout and hymnal vocal bops.

The density of Stephenson’s sample-stitching can obscure the accomplishment of the pairings themselves. There are plenty of sounds and interesting moments I heard only through headphones and furrowed concentration, but I’m not sure I enjoyed the record that way any more than setting it in motion and zoning out. Still, some of the tracks are convoluted enough to constitute a slog. “Janis Joplin,” a short burst of a track in the middle of the record, stands apart. It stutters and clanks along, but it serves up the most immediately digestible, loopy funk here, like an intermission palette-cleanser. I found myself returning to the song often, but never enjoyed it as much out of context. It’s the same effect Stephenson nurtures throughout, arranging unexpected sounds and somehow making them sound perfectly, weirdly in sequence together.