Despite their name, Plant Clones cannot be replicated. A profoundly original group of musicians, the band began planting seeds in the Athens music scene in January 2024 and has been watching those seeds grow for the past year. In that year, the band members found their style and went from a predominately cover band to a group of original songwriters.
“Our newest song we’ve written is Crumb-inspired, but I think we take from a lot of different stuff,” Michaela Meerschaert, a junior studying music production and contemporary music digital instruments, said. Meerschaert serves as the band's vocalist and primary lyricist.
The sound of Plant Clones is emblematic of experimental groups like Radiohead, according to guitarist Heath Benton, a junior studying music production and CMDI. Many of the musicians have been personally impacted by groups like Men I Trust and Big Thief, as well as the jazz styles from which most of their musicianship was born. Although they may not be heard directly in the group’s sound, these bands and styles all help to inform Plant Clones’ songwriting.
“Instrumentally, it’s very collaborative at first,” Chris Harmison, a senior studying CMDI and the group's keyboardist-saxophonist, said. “We don’t have any one person that comes up with all the ideas or writes the music.”
Harmison, Meerschaert and Benton began playing together toward the beginning of their college careers and brought in the group’s remaining members in the fall of 2023 to form the current iteration of the band. Those members are bassist Jayden Rahmon, a sophomore studying CMDI, and drummer Miles Macdonald, a music production major at Hocking College.
In the year since their first show at the start of 2024, the group has performed at most venues in the Athens circuit, from The Union to Donkey Coffee and beyond.
“We played at the Halloween Block Party and then we played in Columbus,” Harmison said. “There is a group called Music Columbus that wanted to feature us.”
In addition to a coveted spot on the block party stage, the fall semester brought Plant Clones a record deal with Brick City Records, a record label operated by the School of Media Arts & Studies designed to provide students with “real world experience in multiple aspects of the recording and music industry.” Each academic year, the record label signs four artists with whom the company collaborates to produce and distribute new music.
“We got real lucky,” Benton said. “We have some really talented producers working with us right now.”
After spending approximately 60 hours in the studio during the fall semester, the group is looking forward to the release of their EP in April. Until then, they plan to continue working together in the healthy rhythm they have found.
“When you’re five different people working creatively on something there’s going to be some tension,” Benton said. “But I think we’re getting better and better at handling that and talking through things.”
In addition to the natural challenges of scheduling time to rehearse and perform, Meerschaert has found certain elements of being in a band to be a two-sided coin.
“I feel like we see each other so often that sometimes we lose creativity and excitement to write new things because of how often we do it, but seeing them all the time is also really fun because we’ve grown a very close connection,” she said.
With the realities of impending graduation, the future of Plant Clones is a little uncertain. Nevertheless, the group plans to extract every ounce of energy and experience out of their remaining time together as students and bandmates.
“We’re putting out an EP but even after that, we’ve still been writing new music and just making stuff,” Harmison said, planning to be the first member of the group to graduate. “Maybe we’ll record it, maybe we’ll just perform it, but we’re going to keep doing stuff at least as long as I’m here.”
