Trees Speak

Tucson, Arizona’s Trees Speak channel 1970s Krautrock, synth drone, soundtrack music, and the electric-era explorations of Miles Davis on Bitches Brew when shaping their rapid-fire electronic experiments and fragmented song forms. Their kaleidoscopic releases, including the 2020 album Shadow Forms and the 2021 double set Vertigo of Flaws: Emancipation of the Dissonance and Temperaments in Irrational Waveforms, deliberately balance listener disorientation with fascination through constant changes in texture and direction. The sixth Trees Speak LP, 2023’s Mind Maze, assembled an expansive range of radical material stretching from avant-jazz to horror-film scoring, while 2024’s TimeFold looked toward musique concrète for its framework.

Multimedia artist and musician Daniel Martin Diaz, formerly one half of the duo Blind Divine, founded the project and enlisted several Tucson underground figures—players drawn from Giant Sand, Black Sun Ensemble, and Myrrors—to record the self-titled 2017 debut and perform its accompanying shows. That somewhat lo-fi opening statement remained almost entirely instrumental and largely spontaneous, moving between serene, Cluster & Eno-style synthesizer passages and more turbulent rhythmic and production-based explorations. The band resurfaced in 2020 with Ohms, issued by Soul Jazz Records in a comparatively refined sonic setting yet still built from seventeen abrupt track-to-track pivots. Later the same year, Shadow Forms introduced traces of no-wave energy into the group’s evolving palette.

May 2021 brought the more cinematic fourth album, PostHuman, which was followed almost immediately by the expansive Vertigo of Flaws double LP. Mind Maze, Trees Speak’s sixth full-length, surfaced in 2023. TimeFold arrived the next year, drawing on early electronic-music traditions and incorporating spoken-word segments from Ashley Christine.