Eric Cloutier presents My Friend The Abyss (PALINOIALP01), an album released via Palinoia on 17 July 2026. Spanning over 25 years of artistic activity, Cloutier’s career has been defined by a disciplined approach to sound and a deep exploration of hypnotic and dub-influenced textures.
We premiere “Celeste,” the fifth track from My Friend The Abyss. The track appears within an album that expands on Cloutier’s signature hypnotic pulse while exploring a wider range of atmospheric depth and sonic structures.
Throughout his career, the Detroit-born, Berlin-based artist has built his reputation through a dedication to record digging and a constant search for deep, hypnotic, and dubby textures. After establishing himself as a mainstay at New York’s The Bunker, Cloutier relocated to Berlin, where he currently serves as a resident DJ at Tresor.
His approach has been shaped by a focus on craft rather than trends, with performances spanning both world-renowned institutions and intimate underground spaces. Through his label Palinoia, named after the Greek term describing the obsessive repetition of an act until it is mastered, Cloutier continues to release his own productions and provide a platform for emerging artists.
With My Friend The Abyss, Cloutier continues to bridge the gap between selector and creator. The album explores a broader musical language while maintaining the hypnotic foundation that has defined his work, featuring tracks including “Ligrothism,” “Hävittää,” “Desassossego,” and “Celeste.”
Read our full interview with Eric Cloutier below.
My Friend The Abyss is your most personal work yet. Why now?
I wouldn’t say there was a calculated decision as to why now specifically, but I mostly felt like I needed to exorcise some demons alongside doing something more engaging for myself in the studio.
I feel like I can make a techno track without much effort overall, so I decided to do some new experimenting and test myself.
What did this album teach you about yourself?
That I have a lot more to learn in the studio!! Hahah.
I’m extremely proud of this septet, but it has triggered me to learn more and make even more intricate things.
The album was shaped by stress, chaos, and loss. How did those experiences transform your creative process?
To borrow a title from a popular book series, “Eric Cloutier’s Series of Unfortunate Events” was two-years of seemingly endless strife and loss and depression and mental and emotional struggling.
Historically, I would have the DJ booth and a crowd to play for to expel my emotions and escape in music, but the scene’s never-ending shifting these days has made the performance aspects less and less, which compounded my mental state into concerns of imposter syndrome and generally being completely forgotten.
It took a random person approaching me in Berghain and asking if I had retired from the scene to really cold-shower me into the need to get out of my head and out of my own way and, coupled with my amazing therapist, reboot and focus all the emotions into the production process, thus kickstarting the beginnings of the album and its tracks.
Diving into the definitions of the words I’ve chosen as track titles on this album (as with all my tracks in general), you can probably figure out where my head was at the time or the monster I slayed upon finishing the tune.
The concept of Palinoia is about perfecting something through obsessive repetition. How much does that philosophy reflect your life as an artist?
I’m never not learning in anything I’m doing. I’m still learning new things when I DJ, and I’ve well eclipsed that 10,000 hours rule.
But with everything I’m attempting, I hone in on something and repeat it until I’m satisfied, but that doesn’t mean I’m calling it complete. Hell, I’m still perfecting recipes when I cook – another thing I take pride in, and an escape from constantly digging for music or staring at Ableton.
It takes me ages to finish music because I’m always looking to find a way to improve the smallest detail, but with the ever-shifting toolset that software allows (I’m not a hardware user whatsoever) I’m constantly gaining a new piece of kit, but utilizing them properly and at the right moment is the challenge. As written in my album PR text, “time is the only distance between the artist and the masterpiece.”
Your sound expands beyond hypnotic techno into ambient, dub, and even drum & bass. What pushed you to break those boundaries?
It’s safe to say that my name is connected to quite a specific sound, borderline my own genre. I’ve seen people say they have a track that’s like Eric Cloutier, and its such a shock and honor simultaneously.
But I’ve had an affinity for ambient for ages – check my 100-hour-long (and growing) playlist on Spotify, for example – but dub has never left my sound since day one. The drum and bass side is a funny one – another thing I secretly love but never really explored in the studio. Somewhere along the way with the album, I realized I was sitting in a comfortable creative bubble and needed to shake things up for myself.
A few of the tracks on the album were actually me just going off script with some ideas, taking wild swings with effects and sounds, and striking gold and building the rest of the track around that – happy accidents, as they say.
Which track on the album challenged you the most, and why?
“Celeste” literally drove me to the brink with the mixdown, but I also built myself a monster that I needed to really spend hours and hours refining and finessing.
This one taught me a lot about mixdown techniques, along with some new ways to make my productions more organic, so it was worth all the yelling and countless hours spent listening to the same thing for so long.
After years of refining your craft, what does success mean to you today?
Continuing to do this until I die is success to me.
It might not always be easy, and I don’t aspire to be some superstar as others do, but knowing I’m moving people and getting very amazing, inspiring, motivational messages from fans and producers in my orbit is enough.
I don’t want to return to the corporate realm if possible, but that wouldn’t signal failure, either. Making an impact, inspiring new producers and DJs, and giving my knowledge to the upcoming wave – that’s success.
In a world of fast-moving trends, how do you stay true to your own artistic vision?
Pride and confidence. I know how cyclical everything is, and the trend-hopping impatience social media has made everyone have, the attention span of a goldfish overall, I know everything will return to me.
But the second I were to succumb to something and not be myself would be so obvious to the people that do follow and love me that I’d lose more than I’d gain, and that’s not right. My mother is also an artist, and she does a very unique and bespoke style of work, but she’s never moved from her vision, and that definitely kept me from sticking with mine, even if times are tough and maybe you’re not chique anymore.
I love what I do, and I do what I love, and I think that translates to my production and my DJing. I’ll continue to hypnotize and time-distort and open wormholes as long as I can, but I’ll do it my way and nobody else’s way, full stop.
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