Trees Speak

★★★★ Vertigo Of Flaws SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP

Tucson, Arizona’s experimentalists drop double-album mindblower!

The core Trees duo Daniel Martin Diaz and Damian Diaz have rustled up four long-players now in little more than a year. This latest is by far their most ambitious, spanning 90 minutes of profoundly exploratory instrumental speculation. Where its pocketsized predecessors have flagged up an interest in motorik, rippling synths and Axelrod-style widescreen arrangement, Vertigo Of Flaws runs a wider gamut, touching on BBC Radiophonic Workshop scoring (Computer Garden), Air’s future-retro synth-pop (Imaginary Forces), spaced R&B groove abstraction à la Joe Meek’s I Hear A New World (Interference) and early Kraftwerk-esque soundwave experimentation (Integration). On the LP’s second disc, things get properly whacked out: Threnody’s beatless, treated trumpets recall 23 Skidoo’s

Seven Songs, while Transfiguration’s blast of free chorale borders on Sun Ra. Among wild wanderings, Trees Speak frequently snap back to a crisp, jazzy bassline groove, making their whole far-out adventure hard to resist.