More than a few descriptions of this Arizona-based, analog-ish, synth-obsessed band’s music reference similarities running from the vague, inaccurate catchall, “Krautrock”, to Italian horror or John Carpenter film soundtracks, Giorgio Moroder‘s desolate synth-scapes or private press ambient and New Age. If you know some or all of these styles or players, the first seconds of Timefold, Trees Speak‘s sixth Soul Jazz-released LP’s opening title track, conjures Moroder, Tangerine Dream, and perhaps Ariel Kalma in equal measure. It’s impossible not to hear these influences. One assumes Trees Speak, which revolves around the duo of Damian Diaz and Daniel Martin Diaz, are well aware of the comparisons and hear them as compliments.
Because that opening mentioned above track, at 4:05, is the longest thing on a 17-track album that clocks somewhere around 39 minutes, Trees Speak don’t have time to wander; instead, their attention to brevity alone signals slightly less-chartered territory for music whose spaciousness seems so familiar. In other words, they don’t noodle aimlessly or arrive at their music accidentally. By contrast, tunes fold in and out of each other, riding on hints found in their predecessors. “Timefold” literally melts right into “Prodrome”, which adds a chattering drum kit to ripples of synthesized rock skips before, just under two minutes later, it fades into a repeated piano line that begins “Digital Oracle”.
On and on like this it goes. Drums return, a harpsichord-based riff underpins what sounds like a flute, a disembodied voice announces something from a tunnel, and by the album’s fifth track, “Psychic State”, we’re in classic Moroder territory, full of frantic synth-induced anxiety. This is as much the sound of the desert’s endless expanse as the claustrophobia of an underground, dimly lit maze. Yet, as mapped out as the music is, the track shifts seem natural, as if the decision to separate them by title only came after the band had listened to the whole of what they’d created.
At times, it does feel as if there’s nothing new here as enjoyable as this Umberto-meets-Kluster is; you’ve heard it all flutter past somewhere before. But then Trees Speak throw “Among Us” at you. Here, for under three minutes, they let those keys and drums play a repeated figure so uplifting it’s nearly overwhelming. It’s a moment of unbridled optimism in a haze of unpopulated landscapes and just-out-of-reach horizons, a bit of “right now” slipped into the otherwise constant, analog future.
If so much of their output seems to wink at the once-radical electronic experiments from Germany or Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps Trees Speak’s role is to allow all those sounds a safe space to reverberate and mutate indefinitely so they can diligently sculpt them into their own mini-movies.