In 2024, OrangeTone felt a shift in his music directly shaped by his immediate surroundings. Montréal sound designer and producer Étienne Dubé found himself drawn toward a local scene centered on a new wave of ambient, introspective trance–a genre that Dubé had long admired but never felt comfortable letting seep into his own work. As Dubé became embedded in a community of like-minded friends, attending shows headlined by the likes of Himera, Malibu, and TDJ, both his creative process and artistic focus began to shift. Gone were the days of toiling over microscopic sound design details, and in their place came a renewed trust in pure emotional instinct.



“In a sense, I wanted my friends to appreciate the music I was making, loosely setting myself the goal of creating something for them that would still be true to my own work,” Dubé says. “It kind of coincided with a general comfort just making music, without thinking too hard about anything.”

The result is Breachlight: five masterful dance tracks that touch on a range of genres–neo-trance, bubblegum bass, and electronica–distilling them into their most visceral and emotionally potent elements. Opening title track, “Breachlight,” carries this essence vividly, juxtaposing sound elements and textures that Dubé claims “make little sense together” yet meld effortlessly. Swirling ribbons of glimmering synths collide with orchestral flourishes before coalescing around the track’s central melodic riff and thumping bass drum.

“Silkloom” harkens back to the architectural sound design of past OrangeTone projects like Lightmixer (2022, Noumenal Loom) and Portail Opaque (2023, Jolt Music), favoring glissanding arpeggios and plucked, marimba textures. “Joie” instead leans into stylistic restraint, drawing out and magnifying the introspective trance textures that are very much at the focal point of Breachlight. “If ‘Silkloom’ was looking back, ‘Joie’ is looking forward,” Dubé says.

At the heart of the EP is lead single “Dream Spiral”, which features vocals from Orange Milk Records mainstay diana starshine. Taking cheeky inspiration from the canned vocal loops on trance records in the early aughts, Dubé and starshine place restrained, cut-down vocal takes atop bright synth riffs and tactile, bubblegum percussion. “The most easygoing track I’ve ever done, I find myself humming this one quite a lot and sometimes craving it,” Dubé says, “making it an obvious choice for a single”.

While the earlier tracks contain a hopeful yet melancholic edge, the EP’s closing track, “Solar Daze,” acts as a resolution. It recalls tones and percussive details from earlier tracks, but reframes them through a purely euphoric lens. Warm sawtooths and sparkling snares pulsate and crescendo into dizzying cinematic bliss. It’s a fitting conclusion for the project shaped by multiple emotional perspectives: one nostalgic and rose-tinted, watching the pinks and oranges blend across a faded sky; another, gazing forward, directly into the sun's dazzling light.