Trees Speak

Tucson, Arizona band Trees Speak look to 1970s Krautrock, synth drone, soundtrack music, and Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis for inspiration when putting together their dizzying experiments with electronics and song deconstruction. The band sought to confuse their listeners as much as they intrigued them, moving rapidly between ideas and sounds on their kaleidoscopic albums such as 2020′s Shadow Forms and 2021′s Vertigo of Flaws: Emancipation of the Dissonance and Temperaments in Irrational Waveforms. The group’s sixth album, 2023′s Mind Maze, is another sprawling amalgamation of radical sounds ranging from avant-jazz to horror film scores.
Trees Speak was formed by multimedia artist/musician Daniel Martin Diaz, previously of the duo Blind Divine. Diaz was joined by other fixtures of Tucson’s independent music scene, including members of Giant Sand, Black Sun Ensemble, and Myrrors, for the recording of Trees Speak’s self-titled 2017 debut album and the shows that went along with its release. The somewhat lo-fi album was almost entirely instrumental and largely improvised, shifting between placid Cluster & Eno-like synth reflections and wilder experiments with rhythm and production. In 2020, Trees Speak returned with their second album, Ohms; it was released by Soul Jazz Records and featured a slightly more polished production but the same quick shifting of ideas over 17 fragmented songs. Third album Shadow Forms followed later in the year, adding a touch of no wave influence to the band’s sound. The group’s more cinematic fourth album, PostHuman, arrived in May 2021. This was soon followed by Vertigo of Flaws: Emancipation of the Dissonance and Temperaments in Irrational Waveforms, an ambitious, all-encompassing double album. Mind Maze, the sixth Trees Speak LP, appeared in 2023. ~ Fred Thomas