His music is influenced by a range of composers and pianists such as Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, classical minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Erik Satie), and modern composers such as Chilly Gonzales and Yann Tiersen.

English pop singer Ellie Goulding has cited Blais as an inspiration for her fourth album.

[4] Looking again for a change, he then moved to Berlin for a year, and then went to South America, spending time in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Finally, Blais decided to settle in Montreal, pursuing a career as a special education teacher.

CFCF) and Blais first collaborated when the Red Bull Music Academy sponsored a live performance featuring the two artists.

Blais and Silver found that they lived around the corner from each other, then started finding similarities in their music and composition style.

[10] Cascades features two songs each of their solo works, reworked as a duo, and a cover of John Cage's In a Landscape (1948).I thought [Jean-Michel's music] was beautiful...

I just loved it a bunch, especially because it's so different from a lot of the other piano music that I had tended to listen to...Cascades was also met with critical acclaim.

For Pitchfork, Andy Beta opined that it "finds Silver and Blais warily feeling one another other out and then synchronizing to exalted effect by the record's end," and called the duo's version of "In a Landscape", "one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable".

gave the album 9/10 in an early review, writing "Far from spiralling inward, as always, Blais lets it all flow through him, and as private becomes public, the result is yet another intimate masterpiece".

[13] On the album, he experiments with different synth and electronic textures, a concept introduced to him while working with CFCF.