Trees Speak - Mind Maze (2023)

Mind Maze is Trees Speak’s fifth album to be released on Soul Jazz Records in the space of little over two years.

"Trees Speak is music as cosmological translation, borrowing from Can and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew-era practice of studio-as-composition-tool, where lengthy improvisations coalesce into indelible flights of fancy with razor blade-assisted tape edits. Trees Speak operates between the subconscious and the unconscious, the radiant and the eclipse, the micro and the macro.

As with all their previous releases, ‘Mind Maze’ is a mind-boggling tightrope walk across an array of musical influences that seamlessly create the unique present-day world of Trees Speak. The band’s sound is characterized by a combination of German krautrock motoric-beat rhythms, angular New York post-punk attitude, 60s spy soundtracks, psych, rock, jazz, and 70s synthesizers and vocoders. There is also a cosmic spatial awareness to their sound; both personal inner space and galactic outer space, as well as a wilful pushing of sonic boundaries.

Here you will find the myriad sounds of 1970s German electronic music (everything from Can to Cluster, Popul Vuh to Tangerine Dream); 1980s New York post-punk and synthcore (from No Wave to Suicide); John Barry’s 1960s movies, John Carpenter’s 1970s horror. You will also hear the influences of French and Italian progressive rock (Magma, Goblin) as well as cosmic, new age and experimental space soundscapes …. an almost endless list of diverse influences that ebb and flow like an ocean of sound, in the process creating a truly unique soundscape that Trees Speak have made wholly their own."