Cole Blouin has never been an artist to colour inside the lines, but ‘Preludes’ feels like the moment the lines themselves dissolve. This new EP captures the eerie electricity of New York at its most chaotic, when the world feels like it’s accelerating and collapsing in the same breath. It’s a record born in a city dancing on the edge, where the club lights and the headlines seem to pulse to the same BPM.
Where his earlier work stretched into long, meticulous sculpting, ‘Preludes’ erupts from instinct. These tracks came quickly, almost violently, like visions scrawled down before they evaporate. And that urgency is palpable. Each piece feels like a fragment of a larger universe where you can see only in flashes, as if someone opened the door to another dimension a crack and let just enough sound leak out to haunt you.
The EP’s conceptual frame of those surreal mini-dreams that flicker just before sleep proves uncannily accurate. Everything here feels suspended between waking and drifting, or between apprehension and surrender.
Tracks rumble with sub-bass that lands straight in the sternum. Noise dusts the air like ash. Digital smears ripple outward like echoes of rituals long forgotten. There’s no beat to guide you, no hook to hold onto; only gravity, vibration, and a feeling of time folding in on itself.
For an artist who once approached production with painstaking precision, this sudden embrace of spontaneity feels like breaking through the surface into a colder, brighter air. These tracks thrum with the clarity that only comes from letting go of perfectionism, control, and certainty.
‘Preludes’ is a dispatch from a liminal world, a postcard from an anxiety-ridden summer, and a quiet prophecy whispered beneath strobe lights all rolled into one. Dark, hypnotic, and fiercely alive, this is Cole Blouin channelling the tremors of the moment into something that feels like both an ending and the spark of something new.