Product Description
Deepak Verbera, the third LP by Austin’s Spencer Stephenson aka Botany, bends the beat-driven path carved by the composer’s first two records into meterless cosmic territory, juxtaposing free jazz arrhythmia with cathedral-filling harmony, ringing off the temple walls with soaring grandeur. The billowing textures that loomed behind his previous output break unabashedly into the foreground, shedding the beats that once stenciled them in. What arises in the absence of discernible rhythm is a psych-inflected scrapbook of atmospheres with tremendous sonic and emotional breadth.
Deepak is a Hindi word meaning “lamp” or “source of light”, and Verbera is a Latin word meaning “lash” or “scourge”. This pairing of words articulates the exact dynamic at play here, as brightness intensifies only to dim into darkness, the album vacillates from heavenly luminosity to earthly severity, soothing and searing in patient turns. In essence Deepak Verbera is a soundscape record created through methods usually found in hip-hop; vinyl samples, looped vocal phrases, pulsing bass, and warm synths all shimmer with kosmische-indebted splendor, like Popol Vuh with MPCs and a stack of secondhand records.
Moving beyond the limited expectations of any single genre, Deepak Verbera presents a closed-eye cinema quilted together from sounds both found and created, with a masterfully blurred sense of which-is-which. We can only assume its creator delights in keeping you guessing.
