The sound is akin to being smothered by some heavenly, heavily pixilated pillow- warm washes of analog static, compressed layers of computerized bleeps, waves of soft, arpeggiated trills, and a beautiful voice emerging from the dense, intoxicating cloud.
Tree Wave are a Dallas-based duo that write fantastic, mind-bending songs with nothing more than some antiquated technology (Commodore 64's, Dot Matrix Printers, Atari 2600's, etc.) at their disposal. Imagine a group mixing shoe-gaze with the electronic guts of an old NES cartridge, pairing a few irresistibly danceable grooves ("May Banners", "Sleep") to the equation and you might get an idea of what kind of unique sound Tree Wave are concocting. Better yet, think of an 8-bit My Bloody Valentine or Stereolab (see: "Morning Coffee Hymn") if the group replaced its French tendencies and vintage 70's Moogs with a couple of 286's.
But forget about where the sounds found in each song are coming from. These technological devices are merely tools and unlike many of their gadget-manipulating brethren, Tree Wave prefer to use these tools not to generate some cool noise and simply leave it at that. The 6 songs (7, if you include the group's Commodore 64 synth program, which can be used with any C64 by dubbing the track to cassette and loading it into the Datassette drive) are all actual SONGS. And these songs, to put it bluntly, are all pretty damn impressive.
But Tree Wave doesn't seem interested in trying to overwhelm or bludgeon listeners with their impressive tunes; instead of beating listeners over their heads, forcing them to sit down and pay attention, the duo seems to have far more insidious intentions in mind. Tree Wave's songs are inviting but not emphatically so- they casually, almost clandestinely draw you in. With repeated listens, the songs start to crawl under your skin. And the more you listen, the more difficult it becomes to wrench these songs out of your system. But after you give Cabana a few spins, frankly, I'm not so sure you'd want to.
