Cole Blouin

Cole Blouin is a Queens-based sound-maker whose practice incorporates improvisation; score-based composition; and song. They are interested in the isolation and juxtaposition of temporal streams; the interactions of memory, imagination, desire, and presence; the historicities carried within material, and how those historicities may be fragmented or recontextualized; and the fragile threshold between the narrative and the poetic. Recently performed notated works include Mundiglossia/Bloom (‘ patiently,’) [2020-2021], a 45-minute soprano saxophone solo for Thomas A. Giles; (time, as) dye, fabric, spent longing [2020], for two violas, bass and alto clarinet, electric guitar, and fixed media; and Mutual Horizon B [2019-2020], for nine musicians. Cole maintains an improvisational practice on the guitar and currently participates in a trio with composer Sivan Cohen-Elias and composer/violist Lauren Siess. With saxophonist Thomas A. Giles, they run Fall Line, a concert series and artist’s initiative. They maintain a performance practice as a songwriter, with their first EP, Songs of Desire and Belonging, being released in January 2021. Their teachers have included Trevor Bača, Victoria Cheah, Joe Morris, Anthony Coleman, Stratis Minakakis, Carla Kihlstedt, and, briefly, Julian Lage. They have attended Oberlin College, New England Conservatory (B.M. Contemporary Improvisation, minor in Music Theory, capstone project entitled “Sound Plasma In The Music Of Horatiu Radulescu”), and participated as a research assistant on music and cognition via MIT’s Media Lab.