Canopée is the second album by Dans les arbres, the improvising quartet of three Norwegians and a Frenchman, and their second for ECM. Its ten pieces were composed by the group in the act of playing, and they move patiently across wide, quiet planes of sound. Each instrument is used well away from its usual role, and the four players share responsibility for the music with a rare degree of accord.

The Frenchman is clarinettist Xavier Charles, who also plays harmonica. Ivar Grydeland plays electric guitar, banjo and sruti box, Christian Wallumrød prepared piano and harmonium, and Ingar Zach gran cassa and percussion. On the 2008 debut, recorded in Eidsvoll in July 2006, Grydeland had played acoustic guitar. Canopée was recorded in Oslo in two sessions, at Biermannsgården in June 2010 and at Cafeteatret in April 2011, with Thomas Hukkelberg as engineer. All pieces are credited jointly to the four musicians, and the group produced the album itself.

The French titles name states of air and light: smoke, vapour, ether, mist, transparency. The sound sources match them, from Charles's clarinet harmonics and Wallumrød's prepared strings to Grydeland's bowed banjo and the differentiated strokes Zach draws from the large bass drum. Three short pieces, La Buée, Le Vertige and La Brume, each under two minutes, sit between the longer improvisations, and L'Immatériel unfolds over more than nine. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2015, Tyran Grillo heard La Vapeur and L'Éther as the most tangible tracks, with gran cassa and clarinet giving them weight.

The debut had been widely praised, and The Wire wrote of it: "There's no end to the delights of this quite magical disc." Reviewing Canopée on The Free Jazz Collective in August 2012, Stef Gijssels gave it four and a half stars and admired "this paradox of lightness and intensity, of freedom and control". Grillo compared the quartet's approach with the Japanese group Nijiumu, and found that this second album came even closer to that ideal of freely improvised music. Recalling a concert in Philadelphia, the broadcaster John Diliberto noted that none of the four played their instrument in a conventional way.

CD edition, ECM 2278, first released on 22 June 2012.