Quinton Barnes is a relentlessly ambitious Montreal-based artist exploring the edges of Canada's music scene. Since 2018, he's built a unique sound, writing, rapping, singing, producing, mixing, and mastering his own work across a prolific discography. For his new album, Black Noise, produced by Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions), releasing June 6 on Watch That Ends The Night Records, Barnes took an assuredly different approach than with his past work, resulting in a release that, while in staunch keeping with his radically innovate methods of expression, presents a bold sonic evolution and showcases the talents and efforts of a diverse collective of Montreal-based artists and musicians in collaboration.
In late 2022, on the heels of the release of his For the Love of Drugs album, Quinton Barnes casually tweeted ‘I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity … not sure how yet but the idea is there’. The tweet was spotted by an acquaintance of Barnes, Ontario-based composer/producer Michael Cloud Duguay, who immediately saw vast creative potential in the idea. Widely acclaimed for his panoramic and idiosyncratic approach to developing highly stylized albums with live ensembles, Duguay reached out to Barnes and offered to collaborate on this project, applying his existing methods of curation, collaboration, and creative distillation to the artist’s vision, and the two began developing the concept for Black Noise.
Inspired by Afropessimist thought and the work of French Economist Jacques Attali, Barnes became interested in noise and the function that it can serve, particularly within the context of Black music, and hoped to situate noise within a context of black cultural expression, fusing soul and gospel-inspired vocals with noise, rapping with noise, and pushing the limits of black genres to an aesthetic and sonic brink. Taking notes, Duguay curated an ensemble out of experienced noise performers and free improvisers living and working in Montreal including members of anti-colonial free jazz quarter Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, experimental reedist and instrument maker Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and audio engineer Ky Brooks. Sessions were booked at the legendary Hotel2Tango studio, a nexus of creative expression in Montreal that has housed sessions for notable releases by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Arcade Fire, Big Brave, and more. The creative process began with Barnes and Duguay commissioning and recording a suite of original classical piano music composed by Montreal based pianist Edward Enman. This material was then sampled, manipulated, and deconstructed to build foundations for lyric-writing and improvised ensemble performance in-studio. This process intentionally contrasted the institutions and imperialist practices of western music with the traditions of Black musical expression by taking a standard western tradition and exploiting its resources for destruction and reclamation.
With funding from The Canada Council for the Arts, the ensemble assembled in Montreal in November, 2024, just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in America. With the spectre of explicit fascism casting a tense shadow over the sessions, the collective came together every day for a week, using the manipulated piano suite recordings as a guide to improvisation and spontaneous composition. Collaboratively exploring different iterations of ‘noise’ through the lens of Barnes’ Black Noise theories and Duguay’s tightly conceptualized creative process, Black Noise coalesced piece by piece. The album’s material ranges from deconstructed acid funk (Black Noise) to an avant-garde post-rock cum footwork tribute to the late new music composer Julius Eastman (What Would Eastman Do?), harsh noise (Art of Survival), frenetic breakbeat (Sober for the Weekend), orchestral drone (Quiet Noise), to Barnes’ most heartbreakingly beautiful ballad work yet on the album closer, Movement 7. Foregrounded throughout is Barnes’ patently potent lyricism and dynamic vocal performance, exploring themes including black nihilism, overlooked black genius, precarity and poverty, grief, and triumph. With a world-class ensemble of instrumentalists supporting him, and Duguay’s refined penchant for sonic worldbuilding, Quinton Barnes has accomplished something unprecedented in both conceptual scope and delivery. Black Noise stands alone not only in its enigmatic approach to genre fusion and collaboration but as a recorded document that undeniably situates noise, creatively and intellectually, within a context of Black cultural expression outside of the trappings of so-called ‘conscious hip-hop’. Black Noise represents something undeniably new not only in Barnes’ rapidly developing oeuvre, but in the canons of hip-hop and experimental music.
2024 was a year of resounding artistic triumphs for Michael Cloud Duguay. Both his own record Succeeder (on the newly-minted Watch That Ends The Night imprint) and eight-piece supergroup Scions' To Cry Out In The Wilderness (idée fixe) demonstrated a panoramic curiosity from the Peterborough-based singer/ multi-instrumentalist/ composer/ producer. Of the former, Dominionated remarked "Duguay has gifted listeners an enduring treasure that’s not going away any time soon." Meanwhile, of the Scions release, Louder Than War raved "there is little doubt that this part-improvisational, militantly avant-garde ensemble has struck gold in this coming together” while stalwart magazine Mojo gave it a laudatory four-star review.
Duguay's uncategorizable new effort Wobbly Yonder is a compact release, clocking in at just shy of a half an hour, but given how much sonic and thematic breadth Duguay and his 19 collaborators manage to cram into it, few would notice its brevity. This diverse supporting cast reveals the extent to which Duguay is embedded within various communities throughout the Canadian music landscape; among these players are Eliza Niemi (Mauno, solo artist on Tin Angel Records), Jamie Kronick (Scattered Clouds), Jason Mercer (Bourbon Tabernacle, Ron Sexsmith, Ani Difranco), Carlie Howell (Beverly Glenn Copeland), Chris Brown (Bourbon Tabernacle, Barenaked Ladies), Stephen Stanley (Lowest of the Low) and Jose Contreras (By Divine Right). While on one hand, the scope of the LP almost gives it the feel of a compilation with each cut embracing different stylistic parameters, on the other hand, its arc is irrefutable and meticulously cohesive.
The catastrophic genesis of this new recording happened fifteen years back when Duguay was playing onstage with the Burning Hell at the 2009 Pohoda Festival in Slovakia. The event was ravaged by a massive thunderstorm and gale-force winds brought down a tent, claiming the lives of two festival goers and injuring dozens more, capturing international media coverage. "
The experience cracked something open in me," recalls Duguay, who stepped away from music entirely around that time and whose subsequent work has often transparently reckoned with his struggles with mental illness. The spectre of this incident remained lodged in his psyche and in 2020 it prompted him to research the phenomenon known as "Föhnkrankheit" as part of his creative process.
A Foehn is a type of dry, warm, down-slope wind that occurs in the downwind side of a mountain range. Anecdotally, residents in areas of frequent foehn winds report illnesses ranging from migraines to psychosis. A clinical review of these effects was published by the Austrian physician, Anton Czermak in the 19th century. A study by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München found that suicide and accidents increased by 10 percent during foehn winds in Central Europe, yet the specific causation of foehn-sickness (Föhnkrankheit) remains unproven.
Since the 2009 incident, Duguay had fallen out of touch with his fellow members of The Burning Hell however, reconnecting with two of his erstwhile bandmates opened up several crucial dimensions of this new project. Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt both ended up with performance and production credits on the album, but they also urged Duguay to explore remote recording, furnishing an introduction to their collaborator Jake Nicoll who had designed and constructed The Scamper, a solar-powered mobile recording studio retrofitted from a 1970s camper RV. Kom eagerly scouted a bunch of recording sites for the album across Prince Edward Island spanning the shore of the Atlantic to an abandoned farmhouse. Nicoll and his specialized rig would later capture Scions' aforementioned 2024 debut.
Liam Cole is a drummer and songwriter from Kingston, Ontario who probably plays in your favourite band. A remarkably deep and lyrical percussionist, Liam studied jazz performance at Humber College before becoming vibrantly active in the Ontario music community, performing live and on records with Little Kid, Michael Cloud Duguay, Dorothea Paas, Poolblood, HIGHS, Chris Brown & Kate Fenner, and many more. Warm Soup At The Big Rain, arriving March 14 on Watch That Ends The Night Records, is Liam’s debut album of solo material after a decade of passionately supporting his friend’s music. His friends have clearly been eager to return that support, as this imaginative, idiosyncratic, and gracefully realized album highlights and celebrates.
After years of patient urging from his close friends and bandmates, Liam turned to his longtime collaborator, producer and composer Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions), to help refine years of private songwriting into a cohesive collection of recorded material. Duguay encouraged a simple process, working with their mutual friend and regular bandmate, engineer and bassist Jason Mercer (Ron Sexsmith, Ani Difranco) at his studio on Wolfe Island, Ontario. The trio worked out the artful and sensitive arrangements heard on Warm Soup At The Big Rain in the studio, showcasing Liam’s distinctive jazz-influenced expressive syncopation, Duguay’s trademark emphasis on drone and rich and articulate use of synthesizer, piano, and accordion, and Mercer’s tasteful cadence in the pocket. The arrangements were filled out by jangly watercoloured performances from guitarist Liam Fenton and finished with a marathon vocal session in Toronto capturing performances by Dorothea Paas, Eliza Niemi, Kenny Boothby (Little Kid), Sara May, Brook Manning (Loom), and more.
In its completed form, Warm Soup At The Big Rain is versatile and ethereal, framing gentle but deeply felt art-pop arias in breezy soundscapes with clear roots in jazz but never obfuscated by music school self-seriousness. Cole’s lyrics, sung in his whisper-quiet baritone, were often developed outdoors while he worked as a farmer, or biked and swam, and themes of nature - birds and bodies of water, especially—present throughout the work, carefully tied into poetic allegory about all manners of love—platonic, romantic, mutualistic. These themes are emboldened by the contributions of friends and lovers who joined him to create this record—one that is discreetly celebratory and which finally highlights the craftsmanship of a much loved member of the Canadian music community and the vibrant circle of friends that Liam Cole’s humble devotion to music has generated.
‘Enigmatic yet reverent music … a compelling debut that moves between big and small moments with grace’ - Uncut Magazine (UK)
‘★★★★’ - MOJO Magazine (UK)
Scions are a new innovative experimental ensemble from Nova Scotia.
The group features members from the award-winning minimalist chamber-jazz quartet New Hermitage, the Polaris-nominated drone-hymn duo Joyful Joyful, and the acclaimed producer and composer, Michael Cloud Duguay. Their collaboration began at the Sappyfest music festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, in August 2022. During this event, New Hermitage and Joyful Joyful connected for the first time and teamed up with Duguay for a spontaneous improvisational performance based on his song writing. The enthusiastic response, capped by a standing ovation, solidified the ensemble's decision to pursue the project further, with Duguay deftly shifting from front-person to producer and musical director.
After being awarded a Canada Council project grant in early 2023 the group took residence in Hotel Wolfe Island on Wolfe Island. Over a week the seven core members lived and worked together, culling material from sunrise improv sessions and collaboratively shaping it into a unique body of work that would later become To Cry Out In The Wilderness.
In June 2023, the ensemble, now joined by double bassist Gabriella Ciurcovich, recorded their debut album in Halifax’s north end. Led by Duguay’s distinctive approach to site-specific production, the recording took place in the sanctuary of St. George’s Round Church, with engineering by Jake Nicoll, known for his sustainable recording methods using a solar-powered, mobile control room. The resulting album, To Cry Out In The Wilderness, finds the ensemble expertly exploring and powerfully combining their skills in jazz, devotional, classical, drone, folk, ambient, metal, improvisational, minimalist and avant-garde music.
The project culminated in a week of production, with contributions from numerous artists from Halifax’s creative music community. Scions then presented their work live, performing on the opening night of Halifax’s Everyseeker festival of experimental music, where they shared the spotlight with the renowned Sun Ra Arkestra.
‘will rewire neural pathways to ingrain itself on your psyche … a powerful example of what’s possible when artists have the courage and conviction to follow their instincts and hearts’ - Dominionated (CAN)
Since the early 2000's, the Canadian singer, composer and producer Michael Cloud Duguay has been weaving his curious aural nest with stray bits plucked from country music, rock, traditional musics, electronic genres, jazz of all stripes, spiritual music, and assorted experimentalisms. His approach has always been immediately recognizable and affable to the ears, but also strange and bewildering. Equally disarming has been the habitual candour with which he speaks about his struggles with mental health, addiction, and homelessness.
As such, at first blush the title of his forthcoming LP Succeeder might seem glib or self-effacing. In actual fact, it extends directly from his characteristic frankness. The record unabashedly celebrates where he came from and his future trajectory as well as his community. Fittingly, it also serves to announce Watch That Ends The Night, his new label alongside lauded Nova Scotian musician Andrew McKelvie (New Hermitage, Scions, Jerry Granelli).
Duguay cut his teeth as a member of several high-profile indie groups including the Burning Hell. Yet as a solo artist he had cultivated such momentum around his work that by the time his sweeping, aptly-titled debut album Heavy On The Glory (2012) surfaced, many regarded it as "long overdue." Following almost a decade of silence on account of his aforementioned health issues, Duguay returned in 2020 with a pair of EPs and his second album The Winter Of Our Discotheque which confronted its preceding period of instability head-on.
The process around his third release, Saint Maybe, began with considerable promise and even major label support,but after forced changes in personnel things became increasingly fraught and the album’s release was delayed by several years. Midway through the album's press cycle Duguay yanked the record out of circulation, frustrated with how distant it all felt from his initial intentions.
Thus Suceeder is an affirmation of working on one's own terms and with one's own resources. It's also a meditation on the subject of home—growing up, leaving and even returning. In fact, the gestation of the record culminated in Duguay moving back to his hometown of Peterborough, Ontario in May of 2023.
In some regards, the album continues to mine the sumptuous, expansive rootsiness of Duguay’s earlier albums, yet also gestures toward the more outward experimentation of several of his upcoming projects through its careful, yearning ambiences. The album's underlying creative process started in spring 2020 when Duguay concocted a songwriting exercise to stoke his creativity and occupy his mind under the duress of the pandemic. He set out to compose one piece of music about every house or institution he had ever lived in—anywhere he received mail or slept for more than 90 consecutive nights. Ultimately yielding upwards of fifty individual compositions, Duguay reflected on the resultant body of work and sharpened his focus looking at only the songs pertaining to his upbringing and time in and out of his hometown, which he had left around the time when his personal obstacles had become untenable. Given the subject matter of the collection, it became clear that recording it in Peterborough and enlisting a cast of local musicians that he knew from its community was the best way to present the material.
The nucleus of his new ensemble comprised a rhythm section of collaborators from the Kingston/Wolfe Island area where he was living during the album's initial phases. Duguay had been awarded Kingston, Ontario’s very first artist-in-residence position and used this opportunity to workshop the album’s material. Around them, he gathered a large group of performers that represented the entire spectrum of his Peterborough experience including old high school bandmates, musical heroes from his teenage years, and his best friend from University. He even included his first piano teacher George Bertok (aka Bertokia), as well as a musician that he had met at his very last show before the lockdowns, Erika Nininger, who plays piano and contributes compositions and arrangements to the record. The vocalist Cormac Culkeen, best known for their poignant work as half of Joyful Joyful, played a crucial role on the LP. "Cormac’s voice is a sound that I most closely associate with my adolescence in this community," notes Duguay of his longtime collaborator. In addition to offering their distinctive otherworldly singing on nearly every cut, Culkeen also coordinated the core sessions for the album at All Saints Anglican Church, where they are a member of the ministry team. Despite being primarily a product of lockdown-era necessity, these five days of live sessions with the nine-piece band captured in the church's sanctuary elegantly amplify the spiritual tenor that's long been a key feature of Duguay's music.
The varied background and instrumentation of the musicians involved also propels Duguay's vision—various credits include the likes of Esmerine, Ani Difranco, Utah Phillips, U.S. Girls, Bob Wiseman, Silver Hearts, Ron Sexsmith, John Southworth. Duguay's stated intention was to produce a sort of "experimental heartland totalism" as he calls it; an amalgam of sounds that recontextualizes aspects of Americana amidst more atmospheric and abstract elements.
For all the album's languid twang and rustic contemplation, it's worth noting that an acoustic guitar only appears on the album once for a mere five seconds and almost half of the material is instrumental. The sonic landscape is in fact populated by all manner of sounds—winds, brass, Duguay's own accordion, hurdy-gurdy, contrabass, fiddle, jaw harp and even disorienting flashes of electronic coloration. The robust auditory environment that he creates with these forces, as Duguay reveals, was designed to evoke "the nocturnal sounds of [his] coming of age in Peterborough: bar bands, rural fields, late-night kitchen parties, many voices joined in song” bathed in a sort of psychedelic nostalgia. And true to the record’s title, he succeeds in carving out this distinct and powerful emotional space.
live improvised performance on november 30, 2023 at radstorm community arts center in kjipuktuk/halifax nova scotia canada.
" but how does this resonance shape our minds and how does this new thought reverberate in our body before it comes unwound at the tips of our fingers and the base of our spines and the heels of our feet? what is the sound that echos or rattles or sings its own consequence? it's thunder. "
On The Winter of Our Discotheque, his first album in nearly a decade, Michael C. Duguay immerses listeners in his complex universe through work which is both familiar and inventive, equally whimsical and stone-cold stoic. The songs in this collection were composed over ten itinerant and disastrous years, in and about his life lived in hospital beds, shelters, and addiction treatment centres. This quasi-sophomore release finds Michael C. Duguay returned to wellness and rapturously reunited with his craft, writing with startling clarity and remarkable candor, withstanding the conventional singer-songwriter label. The Winter of Our Discotheque is a triumphant reemergence, establishing Michael C. Duguay as an idiosyncratic punk-poet whose mercurial work, while firmly rooted in the vernacular tradition, combines adroit pop and the avant-garde to ecstatic and often devastating effect.
The Winter of Our Discotheque (Reprise), a compilation album of Canadian artists performing interpretations, remixes, and covers of the songs of Michael C. Duguay’s The Winter of Our Discotheque. The Winter of Our Discotheque (Reprise) is not only a celebration of Michael’s much-loved personality, songwriting and music, but an enthralling testament to friendship, community, and collaboration by a spectacular and diverse assortment of artists on the vanguard of contemporary Canadian music.
