Botanist’s Album About Ancient Plants Echoes Today’s Climate Crisis

When Otrebor writes a Botanist song, he sets a few rules for himself. First: the song has to have hammered dulcimers instead of guitars. Second: it has to be about plants.

Third: it has to come from the perspective of a character called the Botanist, through whose eyes the pseudonymous San Francisco musician has been writing ecologically-themed black metal songs (or “green metal,” if you will) for the past decade.

“The idea is that it’s a scientist who sees the world being destroyed by mankind’s negligence or meddling and loses his mind,” says Otrebor. “In order to protect whatever he has left of his shattered psyche, he goes off into the forest and creates this world of plants around him. And when he’s there, the plants speak to him.”

The plant voices on Botanist’s new album Paleobotany, out on Prophecy Productions on May 17, come from the late Cretaceous period 70 million years ago — not long before the extinction event that wiped out some 75% of the plant and animal species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

The fossil record suggests plants tended to grow larger than their modern-day descendants in this period, and while some prehistoric species like the magnolia survive to this day, Otrebor describes others that weren’t so lucky, like a tree with “bark like diamonds” whose leaves grew directly out of its trunk.

“You can go out and see a magnolia tree and how pretty they smell,” says Otrebor. “This used to exist back when these megafauna existed. It’s really very inspirational and it gives the lesson that nature is eternal.”

This eco-drama plays across tracks that are surprisingly pop given the project’s esoteric nature. The songs are about three or four minutes apiece, and the vocals by new collaborator Mar are much cleaner than the growls of the past, allowing Otrebor’s intricate lyrics to shine through. Botanical terminology itself, with all its Latinate curlicues, is as key to the project as the dulcimers or the plant-warrior concept.

“I am very motivated by words,” says Otrebor. “It’s how I largely started the concept for the band. I got engrossed in botanical nomenclature and classical botanical art, and I wanted to make a band that was all about that.”

Otrebor got into metal as a teenager while growing up in San Francisco. A lover of heavy music and a voracious reader of Romantic poetry, Otrebor found an instinctive connection between the two disciplines, especially as manifested in black metal — the misanthropic, blisteringly beautiful subgenre that developed in Europe in the ’80s and found its most iconic and influential expression in early-’90s Norwegian bands like Darkthrone, Mayhem and Ulver.

“The music is like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so sinister and dark,’” says Otrebor. “It’s kind of like a thorn bush of roses. If I try to go in, I’m gonna hurt myself. I can cut myself, it’s very unapproachable. But there’s beautiful elements to it, and if you know how to find it, you find beautiful music.”

Botanist started in 2009 and put out its first album, I: The Suicide Tree, in 2011. He’s been prolific since then, releasing music on multiple labels and with various lineups (including as a one-man band). Otrebor’s 110-string dulcimer is central to the band’s sound; as a drummer, he prefers its percussive qualities to those of a guitar.

The inspiration for the Paleobotany concept was surprisingly mundane. Botanist was originally slated to do a split release with Show Me a Dinosaur, a metal band from Russia whose lyrics also skew towards the botanical, and a “prehistoric” concept would fit well with their name. The plan fell through, but the concept was too good to give up.

“And then when I hired [Mar], it was like a dream for her because she loved plants and she also dreamed of being a paleontologist when she was a kid,” says Otrebor.

It’s easy to connect the Cretaceous extinction event described on the album to the current anthropogenic devastation being wrought on the Earth’s species, which ecological conservationists largely agree is equal to any of the mass die-offs that dot the planet’s history once every few eons. The idea of “apocalypse” is central to the project, but while most black metal connects this idea to the Christian rapture and eternal torment in Hell, Otrebor has a more hopeful vision.

“There’s always going to be something,” says Otrebor. “It’s an idea I find very calming within the storm of being afraid of what’s happening with the world and global warming and all these things that are scary — to have this idea that there will always be something, whether the human race is there to see it.”