By: Heather Hodder
From the underground music lab of Hunter Braymer, aka potions, comes Botany FX a ten track experimental bass project that brings the west coast landscape to the dance floor. This psy-bass and trip-hop ambient collection highlights the impressive range of potions, from alien industrial experimental beats to tribal acid jazz downtempo. Botany FX is now available for stream and purchase on all major platforms, peep the fan link here: https://fanlink.to/U7T.
Santa Cruz, California native, potions performed this June at The Untz Festival in Mariposa, California. This past spring, potions completed a tour with his longtime friend Charles Ingalls, better known by his moniker CharlestheFirst, coming across the US from Nevada to New York and Georgia. This June, he signed with Rogue Agency. Braymer is not just a musician but a visual artist. Often Braymer paints and creates the cover art for his music, including the art for Botany FX.
Only a few weeks since dropping, the stellar reviews have been coming in from the bass community. On July 24, EPROM tweeted about potions’ new beats, “five minutes in and I’m floored at the sound design chops. Otherworldly beat music!” Each track on Botany FX paints a picture in sound. potions’ sound is reminiscent of artists like G Jones, leet, Thriftworks. They all take samples, art, hip-hop, glitch, world music and melding together different music cultures, styles and genres.
“Miami” is a versatile track, with Latin influences, jazzy melodies, bouncy steady beat that is perfect for chilling on a boat or taking a drive to the beach. This light and bright track is a total contrast to more combative tracks like “Conduit” and the title track “Botany FX” that sound more like a factory filled with electric noises, shocking stuttering beats like welding parts together or sounding alarms that the secret lab has been taken over. “Ghillie Suit” is eerie with frequency beeps and static distorted synth sounds.
“Coarse Notes” differs the most from the rest of Botany FX and perhaps a track bound to be on your playlist repeat. The sound is anything but “Coarse”; the bass guitar notes are sweet, serenading and delicate, making “Coarse Notes” a soft interlude between more jarring tracks .
On Twitter, Braymer explained a bit about his unusual track titles: “my song titles directly derive from my life. many titles are just the same as the project files and like a journal, relate to whatever was going on in my life when I made the tune.”
“Snnakeskin_Binoculars” has a dream like psychedelic quality with flute samples and a steady synth drum beat that slithers perfectly into “Gojichant/Mescaline,” making the listener feel like going into a trip hop trance and following potions into the unknown sound journey to find the desert oasis of squelched beats.