Teacup Trees from Nodknots by Noddle

# Teacup Trees

Porcelain melodies spill from this track like riddles without answers, brewed during a curious afternoon when Morris discovered his grandmother's antique tea set hidden in our practice space. The chimes you hear? Actual teacups hanging from strings, tapped gently with wooden spoons. We wanted to capture that peculiar moment between the first and second sip of tea—when warmth spreads but clarity hasn't quite arrived.

The round-singing technique borrows heavily from those old English madrigals that Penny obsessed over during her brief stint in university choir, though we've deliberately misremembered the rules. Each voice enters just slightly before it should, creating that sensation of thoughts overlapping and contradicting themselves. Underneath it all, Dale's ukulele intentionally detunes itself throughout the recording—we never fixed it between takes, letting each chord grow slightly more curious than the last.

The field recordings embedded within came from our picnic in Wistman's Wood, that ancient, moss-covered oak forest where every tree looks like it might start talking if you turned your head. We spent hours there collecting sounds, whispering nonsense into jam jars, trying to trick the forest into answering back.

There's a hidden nod to Vashti Bunyan's delicate pastoral wonderings in the bridge section, though we've filtered it through our own peculiar lens where meaning keeps slipping sideways. The Mellotron swells—those ghostly, wavering chords—came from an instrument we found abandoned in an old church hall, half its tapes missing, the others stretched from decades of use. Its imperfections felt perfect for a song about questions that pour like liquid but never stay still long enough to drink.

We're the dreamweavers who tumble through sonic rabbit holes with our kaleidoscope contraptions. Our music? Whimsical melodies dancing with off-kilter rhythms, while nonsense poetry drips from teacup harmonies. Lose yourself in our mismatched wonderland!