The Smoking Trees album Acetates is almost complete and in it’s mixing stage. There are 21 songs on this debut long player with lots of hidden content and bonus material added in the album. This album was produced and mixed entirely by Sir Psych, and it contains all the elements of psychedelia. Everything from pop psych to folk to full on fuzzed out psychedelia. This album will definitely be a highlight to end 2012, and birth a beginning of a new sound. We feel our sound is incomparable to anything released in the psychedelic field since the 60’s. Plenty of harmonies, guitars, crashing drums, keys, backwards melodies all bundled up in reverb and tremelo. There is no official date of release yet, but it will be available in the coming months. Until the, check out our latest release from Acetates “See” available to stream here:

http://colourtreerecords.bandcamp.com/

and also available for streaming here:

http://soundcloud.com/sir-psych

The story of The Smoking Trees starts in 2001 when Sir Psych was introduced to L.A.AL. Sir Psych also introduced Al to new areas of music and bands that he has never heard before. Before you know it he went from NOFX & Propagandhi to The Left Banke & The Zombies. As Sir Psych’s record collection was more explored by Al, the more he felt more connected with the psychedelic music that he was currently connecting with. One day Al played “Defecting Grey” by The Pretty Things for his father and he thought his son was losing it. Little did he know that his son was just developing a new found love for experimental music.

Sir Psych and L.A.AL grew a strong bond and slowly started recording home demo’s on 4 track of their own psychedelic pop songs. Al was still recording with his other band, and the project he was recording with Sir Psych was just in fun. Sir Psych was recording and producing hip hop for the underground elite and his own crew Forensics.

It was the summer of 2003, when they recorded a song in Sir Psych’s studio apartment bathroom in El Monte, Ca. They knew that they recorded a song that was the beginning of what was to come. During these sessions in El Monte, they recorded several songs including “Morning Music from Yesterday”,  “Hot Bread”, and “Like a Phoenix”. Still nameless, they had names such as Velvet Tuesday & The Good Smells. It was a trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain that the name The Smoking Trees came about. During the 45-minute trip from L.A to Valencia, Southern California was being burned from these wildfires that are here every summer. This particular year in 2003 it was very bad. Smoke was everywhere. Al said that he had a cool name for a band, The Burning Trees. Sir Psych retorted with “how about The Smoking Trees, because there was more smoke than fire.” They laughed and the name has stuck with them ever since.

During their years of home demo’s, they knew they had something special with their sound. Al’s band drifted away, and he even thought of just giving up music all together. But Sir Psych wouldn’t let him.

Since then, they have started families, and had little time to dedicate to their music. It was January 2011, that that all changed. Sir Psych resigned from his full-time job and concentrated on recording music full time. That sparked something in Al and the songs started to come out again. Sir Psych already played the drums and keys, but self-taught himself the guitar and bass and started to come out with some tasty originals. For someone that didn’t know how to play a note, but played by sound, Al was impressed with what was coming out of the speakers. After that, the songs came out easily.

In 2015, Al decided to leave The Smoking Trees project after recording their first official album, TST. The recording sessions for TST were recorded between 2 years, and several songs were recorded during their weekly sessions. That lead to their next release, The Archer and The Bull, which were recordings from The TST sessions that were finished or then finished by Sir Psych. 

The next LP, The Adventure Continues… was recorded and mixed in the same fashion as the previous albums except all recorded and produced by Sir Psych. After the album release, Sir Psych took a year long hiatus from writing and recording, and then the world was hit by Covid. That lead to a whole year of recording music and new songs were born. 

The next album, entitled Year……