‘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.
