TRIO, the new album by vegetable.machine.animal (vma), release date – 14 August 2026. This album is co-released between skirted Records and Audio Foundation Records.

TRIO feels like the completion of the first full cycle of vegetable.machine.animal. In our initial, grandiose way, we planned for TRIO to be released alongside the album GUEST in 2025 as part of the NZSM/Toi Pōneke Artist in Residence position held in 2024. We wished to present them as a couple of bookends for the possible scope from which this project might grow. A full album of ‘trio’ material was gathered, mixed … and then fully discarded as falling short of the mark required to be satisfied.

It was apparent to the ears of skirted Records that substantial work was needed to find vma’s coherent voice. After tours, residencies, explorations, failures, and a lot of playing, we are proud to present this iteration of TRIO to all who are interested in hearing.

In the first two weeks of January 2026, all the gear was installed in an old, out-of-action wooden Salvation Army hall in Island Bay. The cherry log that was gifted during the 2025 tour of Aotearoa had flourished again in a bloom of mushrooms, offering up the essential voltage to tickle the synth. Playing was daily, and hours of recordings were collected.

An invitation to play MONA fuelled the motivation to complete the album earlier than anticipated. There is nothing like a deadline to make things happen. It had to be edited, mixed, tweaked, remixed, mastered, artworks and layouts designed and completed all in short order to get to the factory for production with the hope it would return in time for the Australia tour. The efforts were compounded by simultaneously replicating exactly the same process in completing the vma album Electrical Minzu 35, .

The following text is printed inside the TRIO package.

Listen—to reverb that bounces from the wooden walls of an aging Salvation Army hall, back into the microphone. There, sound waves convert to electrical signals. On the stage sits a drum kit, with timber shells from unknown forests. From hand, the impact from wooden sticks makes drum skins sing. Beside the kit, a chunk of cherry tree—a deathbed for lifeyness. Beneath bark, mycelial threads infiltrate, feed, and flourish into fruiting bodies up on the surface. Here be mushrooms. Life contains voltage. Fluctuations, detected by sensors, connect to the modular synthesiser—where electrical impulse becomes sound wave. A living interface presents—the human responds. 
The circuit is continuous, spontaneous, unrepeatable.

TRIO is the response to the curious idea—“What could ‘more-than-human’ music sound like?”, music that includes more than our shared and exclusive conception. VMA, the “interspecies trio,” is our small unit of investigation. In human terms, this album could be called a solo album. However, that negates the contributions that non-human and circuited elements provide. 
Together, we have achieved so much more than I could alone.

The music for the tracks came first. The naming of the tracks is a relatively arbitrary process. Several titles came from provocations used on the day — provocations that set limits, directions, and parameters. Other titles are either collected from scraps of writing we have lying around the house, or from phrases that leapt from the pages of books being read at the time, authors such as John Berger, Báyò Akómoláfé, Robert Macfarlane, and Lee Hana.

All the parts are assembled and sent to the factory for production. But disappointingly, the production timeframe for this job is considerably longer than that of the previous album, Electrical Minzu. The estimated delivery date falls after my departure for the Australian tour. We request a small quantity to be delivered to an address in Sydney. The copies can be collected in the second week of the tour. The day of my flight to Brisbane comes.  As we preparing to leave, a text from FedEx arrives saying the box is out for delivery – earlier than projected! For a moment, there’s hope, but that becomes dashed. We need to leave. Chrissie drops me off at the airport, I dither for a bit before heading to the departure lounge. That weird space where, once upon a time, a stamp inside your passport would create a strange sleight of hand of being in-between countries. I’m five metres from entering when a text states a box has been deposited in a shed! I contact Chrissie, and like a champ, she races back across the city with a small bundle of CDs. TRIO is delivered to the gate – available only on tour.

Thanks are offered to the following: Audio Foundation, Pyramid Club, all the glorious oddball music makers, Jess and Barry, Timothy Morel for eternal optimism and enthusiasm, CreativeNZ for funding support, Te Kōki / New Zealand School of Music, Mak@disposablebelief for the b&w photo, Kai-Yu Liu, Glory and Sam for the log that keeps giving. Special mention – Andreas Lepper, for the friendship, the instruments, and the hall! Always, always, Chrissie xxx.