Preston Hardwick releases 2 new mini-albums Credit: Courtesy

Seeing Preston Hardwick on stage laying down the rock hard and heavy with noted Orlando bands like Weak and Audible Parts will give you certain ideas about where his artistic passions lie. But on his own, he actually drops beats. And it’s more than just a casual diversion. When it comes to electronic dance music, he’s a disciple driven by a thirst to not just know the classic forms but to create them himself.

As a teenager, Hardwick immersed himself in the EDM world first as an internet bookworm. “I was discovering the vast subgenre landscape with a newish tool on the internet, Wikipedia,” he says. “As funny as this sounds, I would comb through subgenres of music reading about them, and then going and illegally downloading them from some virus-infested P2P software onto my family computer.”

Those seeds would ultimately spawn a remarkably versatile practitioner of pre-millennial dance idioms, an EDM nomad with a crate-digger’s range. Over the years, Hardwick’s releases have traversed breaks, house and IDM. Now, though, he’s just dropped two new EPs in short order that further widen his scope.

On one end, there’s Now That’s What I Call Ambient, a collection that’s exactly as advertised. The six-pack of vaporous ambient drones is, as Hardwick puts it, “a love letter written to Frutiger Aero and Paulstretch.”

On the other, much more banging tip is DJ Smokeshop, a nostalgic hardcore trek that delivers altered states at breakneck BPMs. From the manic psychosis of “Bogo Vape” to the dubby jungle of “Push to Start Ziploc Bag” to the cerebral breakbeat of “3X Boner Pills” and “Chinese Glass,” it’s a tight crash course on drum & bass. “Yeah, jungle, breakcore, and early ‘intelligent dnb’ has been on my daily playlists since I was a teenager,” says Hardwick.

Now That’s What I Call Ambient and DJ Smokeshop are back-to-back testimonials of Preston Hardwick’s ability and studiousness as an electronic dance artist. Both EPs now stream everywhere.

Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.

Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Or sign up for our RSS Feed

This article appears in Sept. 24-30, 2025.

Music columnist.