Zakes Bantwini’s ‘Echoes of Botanical Gardens’ unearths new ground

There’s a particular strain of contemporary music that mistakes ambience for profundity — a sort of sonic aromatherapy designed to offer depth without risking anything. At first, Echoes of Botanical Gardens, the collaborative project from Zakes Bantwini and Skye Wanda, appears precariously close to that category — mostly because of its title, which invites a bit of scrutiny: botanical gardens are, after all, curated nature — controlled, cultivated, self-congratulatory spaces where wilderness is permitted, only under supervision.

But, to dismiss this seven-track album as mood music would be to miss its much more subversive intention. What Bantwini and Wanda have assembled isn’t a retreat from intensity but a recalibration of it — a suggestion that stillness and passivity aren’t the same thing, and that restraint can sometimes have a better outcome and be more impressive than spectacle.

Bantwini’s career has been built on scale. His previous work — not least the commercially seismic Ghetto King — demonstrated a knack for marrying Afro-house’s kinetic energy and easy trance-y vibes with an instinct for catchy hooks that resonates globally. But with this album, he deliberately sidesteps that expectation. He’s said, frankly, that at the moment he’s no longer interested in recreating past successes. Echoes of Botanical Gardens bears that out. This isn’t an album designed to dominate charts or get whoops and cheers on dance floors. It’s an exercise in paring down — a rejection of repetition, of excess, a denial of the increasingly desperate need within the industry to be instantly, endlessly consumable.

When I produce, I always ask: what does this moment feel like in nature?

Bantwini’s explanation of his process is telling: “When I produce, I always ask: what does this moment feel like in nature?” That idea manifests as a kind of structural patience. The percussion is layered but unhurried; the arrangements expand without crowding themselves. “The space between the notes is as intentional as the notes themselves,” he says — it’s that attention to absence that gives the record its shape.

This is, by Bantwini’s own admission, a departure. After the success of Ghetto King, he could have continued mining the same terrain. Instead, he describes Echoes of Botanical Gardens as “a deeply intentional body of work … not a collection of songs but a single, cohesive journey.”

If Bantwini supplies the framework, Wanda provides its emotional coherence. Her role isn’t by chance; it’s central to the album’s feel. “I approached the vocals like a guide walking someone through the garden,” she says. Her voice moves through the record with a deliberate elasticity, at times barely registering, at others opening into something fuller but never ostentatious.

Her performance resists polish. “This project asked for honesty more than perfection,” she says. Her vocals don’t soar, they are “whispers between the trees” and “full blooms”. She prioritises emotional continuity — “like the same wind moving through different parts of the garden”. Intentionally, she leaves moments slightly unresolved, slightly fragile. On Mina Nawe, this restraint becomes overt, and “speaks about a woman who’s lost faith in a relationship — at a certain point you have to ask, ‘If I’m not the one, let me go’”.

Bantwini is careful to dismantle any expectation of piety as performance. “Phezulu and Wena Baba are not church music dressed in house clothing,” he says. “They’re honest expressions of gratitude and reverence that happen to live inside a rhythm.”

He adds, “I’d be dishonest if I said otherwise,” when asked how much of the album reflects his own life. “This is a season of deep introspection for me … Echoes of Botanical Gardens isn’t a performance of spirituality. It is a manifesto of where I actually am.” Bantwini insists that he does not see a contradiction between spirituality and physical movement — that surrender on a dance floor can be as much a spiritual act as any formal expression of belief.

That same refusal extends to his treatment of Afro-house itself. “I’m not trying to slow it down — I’m trying to deepen it,” he says. “The dance floor is sacred to me … I believe the body and the soul move together.”

Perhaps the most telling remark comes when Bantwini describes where he finds himself creatively: “It represents the stage where I stopped needing to prove anything … creating only because the music demands to exist."

Echoes of Botanical Gardens offers no instant gratification. It asks for patience and attention. Wanda, characteristically, frames it gently. If listeners take anything from the album, she hopes that “they’ve stepped into a quiet garden inside themselves — a place where reflection, healing and faith can exist together”.

Bantwini says that his hope for Echoes of Botanical Gardens “is that it moves people and becomes the soundtrack for someone’s quiet morning, their long drive, their moment of reflection”. For those prepared to meet it on those terms, the rewards are considerable; the sense of having been accompanied through a landscape that feels at once carefully constructed and unexpectedly real.

Echoes of Botanical Gardens is out now.