Feature
The Trees Have Unionized
The Forest Convenes
A Missoula trio has spent four years and two records on a single story about a forest. Side two of the new one is a twenty-two-minute suite scored like a committee meeting. The band will not tell you what it means. Neither will we.
The theater in Missoula holds a few hundred people, and on a Saturday night in October every one of them sat very still for twenty-two minutes. On the stage were three men and a great deal of equipment. They were playing the second side of their new record, Equal Light, all the way through, without stopping and without a word in between.
The band is The Trees Have Unionized. Curtis Reave sings, in a range higher than seems advisable, while playing bass, bass pedals and synthesizer, sometimes all three. Ambrose Teller plays electric, twelve-string and classical guitars in tunings he declines to name. Emerson Roth plays drums and percussion and writes every word. They have been together since 1978 and have recorded two albums for Old Growth Records, and if you live east of the Continental Divide you have very likely not heard either one.
The story of the band, as the band tells it, which is seldom, begins on its third night together. Roth set roughly forty handwritten pages on the table and said it was an album: a concept record, in three parts, about a forest. Reave read it twice. Teller read it once and said he could already hear it. The Wild Wood, in 1980, was the first part: the forest as it was, every tree reaching at its own pace for its own patch of light. Equal Light is the second. A third is promised and has not been scheduled.
On Equal Light the forest convenes. It votes. The canopy is to be shared and the light made equal, and the band insists, in the music, that the warmth of this is real. The first side lingers in it generously. Then the record turns. The second side is scored as procedure, not villainy: a vote, minuted and carried, and the work that follows. It is called "Hatchet, Axe, and Saw," among other things. No one in it is wicked. It is the tensest music we have heard this year, and nobody raises his voice.
"Saying it," Roth said, "would make it smaller."
We have heard it said that the record is about something other than trees. We put this to Roth after the show, in a hallway behind the stage, while Teller re-strung a twelve-string with great care and Reave sat on an equipment case with a cup of tea. Roth thought about it for longer than was comfortable. "Saying it," he said, "would make it smaller." Then he went to help with the cases.
Onstage they do not talk between movements. Reave sings with his eyes closed and his feet working the pedals as though he is walking somewhere a long way off. Teller changes guitars without looking, between bars. Roth plays very precisely and very hard and looks, most of the time, as though he is listening to something in the next room. When "The Understory" ended, nobody applauded for several seconds. Then everybody did, for a long time, and the band stood there and let them, and did not play an encore.
Last year the band played twelve dates, eleven in Montana and one in Idaho, every one of them loaded in through a side door. This year it played fewer and better. Old Growth Records has pressed more copies of Equal Light than of the first record, and they are going. It is our view that people outside Montana should hear it. It is the band's view, as far as we can tell, that people outside Montana are welcome to.