Space Punk Artist Collective CHANT announce their debut album Relics of Tree Worship (In Dub), released on vinyl on Saturday 18th April 2026 for Record Store Day and on CD and digital on 22nd May via new eco label Balance Recordings. Featuring artwork by the late Jamie Reid, it marks the first in a planned series of releases from the evolving collective of musicians, producers and environmental artists.
Featuring Youth (Martin Glover), Gaudi, the late Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Kermit Leveridge (Black Grape), Don Letts, Dan Morrell and Planetman, the record blends dub, ambient textures, spoken word and ritual chant into a meditation on trees as cultural, spiritual and ecological anchors.
The album’s ‘Vision Tree’ artwork was originally created by Jamie Reid in the 1990s and revisited for this project, one of his final creative works. Courtesy of the Jamie Reid Estate and John Marchant Gallery, the image anchors the project in a lineage of British countercultural art, extending CHANT’s environmental ethos into visual form.
CHANT was formed by environmentalist Dan Morrell and producer Youth as a creative extension of Morrell’s long-standing tree-planting initiatives. Released via new eco-label Balance Recordings, a proportion of funds from Relics of Tree Worship (In Dub) will support tree-planting initiatives.
“The bottom line of CHANT is simple,” says Youth. “It’s artists coming together to plant trees while making great music.”
Each track on the album is dedicated to a specific tree species. Album opener ‘Cedar Da Trees’, featuring Kermit Leveridge, draws on the cedar’s vast mythological and spiritual lineage – from the forests of Gilgamesh to sacred architecture and ceremonial spaces across cultures. Rather than treating trees as metaphor, CHANT approach them as living collaborators; field recordings and organic textures intertwine with deep, spacious dub production to create an immersive sonic environment.
As a dub record, Relics of Tree Worship (In Dub) uses repetition, low-frequency depth and space as a form of meditation. Youth and Gaudi’s production balances analogue warmth with expansive sound design, while contributions across the album bring history, myth and contemporary environmental urgency into dialogue. The project also marks one of the final creative appearances of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, whose legacy of sonic experimentation and spiritual subversion resonates throughout.
For Kermit Leveridge, the project offered a deeper connection to the natural world. “Be here right now,” he says. “Stand in the dirt, get it between your toes. This is the real thing.” His contribution to ‘Cedar Da Trees’ channels both mythic history and lived experience, grounding the record’s expansive themes in something immediate and physical.
Across ten tracks, from ‘Grand Father Oak’ to ‘Silver Ghosts (Moon Light on Birch)’, the album traces a mythic botany of resilience, memory and continuity. Where dub once dismantled structure, here it becomes a reflective space for reconnection – grounding sound in soil, history and collective action.
TRACKLISTING
- Cedar-Da-trees (Sunglasses after Dark)
- Willow Mother (Cauldron of Knowledge Dub)
- The Ocular Hawthorn (Clevermore Evermore Cloven Foot in Dub)
- Sequestral Dreams (High above the Clouds Dub)
- I Love YEW (Sunshine in the Darkest Night Dub)
- Mythos of the Magnificently Plain (Empress of the Multiverse, Ark of the Cosmos Dub)
- Grand Father Oak (Master of the Myths, Master of the Magic Hare Krishna Dub)
- Rowan Concupiscence (Two in the Bush, Berry Vicious Dub)
- Silver Ghosts (Moon Light on Birch )
- Revelation Generation (Seeds of Creation, Beech Dub)
Editors Note
Balance Recording is an eco-label associated with Balance Eco Ltd. Its model supports tree-planting and Land Art Forest initiatives designed to promote biodiversity, community-based income and long-term environmental action – a three-pillar approach that connects creative output directly to regenerative land projects.