My new album ‘Concrete Botany’ is out now on Home Normal.

‘Concrete Botany’ is an album inspired by the artist’s psychogeographical walks around the area surrounding his East London home. These tracks explore the edgelands of Leyton and Leytonstone, interzones between the urban and rural, including community parks, cemeteries, underpasses and industrial estates.

Field recordings from these sites were processed and added to during artist residencies at Electronic Studio Radio Belgrade in Serbia and EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm, Sweden.

Radio Belgrade’s historic 1970s EMS Synthi 100 is the same model of synthesiser as used by Eduard Artemyev for the score to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker movie. Its oscillators, filters, envelopes and sequencer provide the majority of the electronic tones on Concrete Botany, and it was also used to treat the environmental sounds through its filters and reverb.

Further electronics were recorded with the Buchla 200 modular synthesizer system at EMS, where the album was mixed down with the addition of analogue delay effects and spring reverb, with final tape mastering by Ian Hawgood.

Credits

Released by Home Normal on limited CD and download, 1 January 2026.

Environmental sounds recorded in East London, May 2023 – February 2024.
EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer recorded at Electronic Studio Radio Belgrade, June 2024.
Buchla 200 synthesizer and AKG BX20 spring reverb recorded at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion), Stockholm, October 2024.

Written and recorded by Wil Bolton
Cover art by Wil Bolton
Mastered by Ian Hawgood

Reviews

“British composer Wil Bolton returns with the new album Concrete Botany, out on January 1st, 2026 via Home Normal; it unfolds as a topography of tone, where field-recorded debris and analog murmurs are folded into slow-shifting structures that feel excavated rather than composed.

Electronic pulses hover like distorted cartographies—oscillators smudging the edges of space, filtered drones blooming into metallic overtones, and environmental traces flickering through the mix like ghosted coordinates. Melody is more insinuation than line, emerging briefly from layers of granular texture before dissolving back into the album’s mineral hush, a dialogue between ruin, resonance, and open air.

What results is a quietly visionary soundworld: ambient cartography rendered as psychic terrain, mapping the porous boundary between built environments and the inner landscapes they quietly shape.” – Son of Marketing