Bleep

Jesse Chandler’s debut as Pneumatic Tubes harnesses nostalgia so vividly, produced in an attic amongst home movies and family relics for a few decades.

The Midlake multi-instrumentalist approached A Letter from TreeTops like sifting through family keepsakes and photo albums. In the wake of his father’s passing, Chandler retreated to his childhood home in Woodstock to unpack memories from a bucolic upbringing in Upstate New York. He left days later with the basic framework for an album, enlisting the help of Midlake’s Paul Alexander and singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler among other friends for its finishing touches.

TreeTops, which takes its name from a beloved camp attended by several generations of the Chandler clan, gorgeously evokes snapshots of blissful summers sans any mothball aroma. ‘Summer’s Children’ introduces the album’s retro gaze with a slow waltz, lead leisurely along by Chandler’s flute and clarinet. Considering his woodwinds are the pneumatic tubes he named the project after, Chandler lets them guide the album in a gauzy looseness that lands somewhere between ambient modern composition and ornate folk of the ‘60s. Thankfully, TreeTops doesn’t become complacent within its wistful bubble, allowing a few psychedelic zone outs (‘Camp Sunfrost’, ‘The Big Deep’) and an elegiac second half that peaks with Nadler’s ethereal vocals on ‘Witch Water.’

A Letter from TreeTops makes a welcome addition to the synthesised new age revival happening alongside Green-House and Joseph Shabason’s latest works, but more than that, Chandler’s debut is a loving immortalisation of yellowing family photo books and summers past that you didn’t need to be present for to be moved by.