Cole Blu

Cole Blu is the art pop project of Cole Blouin, an NYC-based composer, sound artist, guitarist, producer, and songwriter. Their debut release, Torso, begins with the influence of such songwriters of individual experience as Joanna Newsom, Kate Bush, Frank Ocean, Phil Elverum, and Joni Mitchell, but charts a course outward, crossing territories of krautrock, glitched-out electronic music, drone minimalism, noise, and ambient music. The record’s formal sensibility - as much derived from the art cinema of Clair Denis, Bi Gan, and David Lynch as from song - helps the total experience of the work rise above eclecticism, towards some arguably mystical all-encompassing unity. This formal unity encompasses difference and stratification with care and patience: the kinetic urge to fragment or explode is increasingly encumbered, as if tied down with a heavy weight, such that the music generally slows as it continues. From the hyper-compressed time-scales of ‘Boston Story’ and ‘The End Of Summer’, the music flows outward, to the expanses of ‘Patmos’, ‘Quiet Nighttime’, and ‘Thundering, Blissful’. At once reflective and rhythmic, emotional and cerebral, urban and rural, Torso stares down existence from the smallest to the largest scales, finding moments of meaning as revelatory in their mundanity as their cosmicity.