Posted on July 7, 2010 - by Mark Zonda

Tree-V

On nowadays music scene, with everyone trying to monkeey all the possible stereotypes of the scene, that is the everlasting Franz Ferdinand clones in fuzzed post-punk sauce, it’s quite an unexpected breath of fresh air emerging from a bath in the web and discover bands like “Visions of Trees”, from Londong. And I wouldn’t even define their music ’80s Retro Electro-Nostalgia or New-Jungle Psychedelia, nor even video game music. Their music is just brave, and classy. ‘t was enough for me to try and interview’em.

Mark Zonda: Visions of trees. Minimalism, electropsycadelia and stereo noises. Why not a pop band?

Joni: The new stuff we’ve got coming up is pretty poppy actually! It’s still got the same messed up feel rhythmically and sonically but vocal-wise we’ve got a lot of pop stuff pushing through. It’s like psychedelic R&B. I just feel that a lot of pop lacks depth and I guess that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Mark Zonda: How the project was born and who were the first to believe in it?

Joni: Me and Sara met late last summer and started hanging and working on some jams and ideas I had. I had a pretty strong vision of the aesthetics and the concept of what I wanted to do and Sara happened to share a lot of the same ideas. We wanted to do something that has longevity and have no artistic limitations as far as the sound is concerned. It was important for us that we established that from the get go. I suppose we got pretty decent blog space with our early stuff, so like Get Off The Coast and Weekly Tapedeck initially got our name out there which then led to an EP with Royal Rhino Flying Records. We got a lot of love from the US before getting noticed in the UK.

Mark Zonda: Are you influenced by the ’80s and Eurodance? What about Brian Eno?

Joni: Definitely influenced by certain aspects of all of those. I’ve got a lot of respect for Eno, although I wouldn’t necessarily count him as a major influence.. I would say rave, pop and R&B music from the early 90 are big influences. And hip hop from that era for sure but lot of our influences are from outside music and art.

Mark Zonda: Why masks?

Joni: We’ve stopped wearing the masks live for now but I feel that sometimes certain images are strong enough to be the ‘face’ of the band. We’re not making music to get our faces on papers and blogs or whatever. That’s one of the reasons we want to start using visuals for our live shows.

Mark Zonda:  What should we expect from your live shows?

Joni: Our live set up is evolving all the time. It’s getting to a point where it’s quite complex but that gives us freedom to do more with it  just being the two of us. We’re working with an amazing visual artist and we feel that projecting visuals will add quite a bit to the live experience. Sara is also in talks with couple of dancers…

Visions of Trees – “Sometimes It Kills”

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