Closed City is a collaborative project from songwriter Mathias Kom (The Burning Hell) and composer Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions, Quinton Barnes’ Black Noise), inspired by the dozens of 'closed cities' established during the Cold War. The two Canadian artists had worked together extensively in the 2000s, lost touch, then reconnected in 2021 and conceived of a project which would combine their shared interests in avant-garde metal traditions, drone, musique concrete, folk, and orchestral music.
Duguay and Kom were interested in exploring world-building and themes of (dis)connection and isolation, and ultimately Closed City was composed during a two-week artist residency on a remote eastern archipelago of Finland's North Karelia, in January 2024. In extreme winter conditions, the two lived together in a centuries-old log house at the tip of a coniferous headland, warmed by a masonry heater, surrounded by unexplored rocky islands and a WWII military defense line on the Finnish-Russian border. They were joined occasionally by Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo as they developed framing concepts and musical ideas.
Kom, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, was drawn to both the folk traditions and the Cold War history of the region, and became especially fascinated by Soviet era closed cities. Intentionally isolated, remote, and left off official maps, closed cities hid mining, military, and industrial complexes, and were often home to thousands of resident workers sworn to secrecy about their locations and occupations. The album imagines a nameless closed city, forgotten by a world that has long since moved on, inhabited by residents who have little memory of their original purpose there. Their lives are shaped by routine and vague labour, tending an endless fire deep in the earth beneath their homes. This tranquil drudgery is disturbed by the arrival of shadowy visitors, who emerge from the ice fog to press their faces against the city's thick glass palisades. Ultimately rejecting the possibility of communication or exchange, the residents turn inwards and reassert their isolation.
Duguay composed the album’s music, an exploratory weave of experimental metal, folk, and orchestral brass, guided at first by the clustered overtonal frequencies of the cabin’s discordant piano, which struggled to stay in tune in the deep January cold. Further influenced by the concepts of 20th century totalism (Mikel Rouse, Arnold Dreyblatt, Lois V Vierk), the collision music approach of Bill Laswell, and Zorn’s avant-metal explorations, he mirrored Kom’s elliptical lyricism, transmitting the closed city research into a sound world that conveys monotonous toil and bristles with anxiety, but offers fragmented glimpses of life beyond the walls. Nearly all of the material features arrangements for low brass instruments, their broad timbres recalling fog horns and other means of signalling across distance and extreme weather.
Rejoining a year later, Kom and Duguay produced the album in the distant North Atlantic harbour city of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Joined by a team of local collaborators including a six-piece low-brass ensemble, the album was recorded over five days in a decommissioned church, and mixed by Canadian noise musician and scholar, Ky Brooks.
“As a metaphor for intentional isolation and its unintended consequences, the closed city was on our minds while we wrote the music and lyrics in the frozen January of northern Karelia. The snow and ice seemed to go on forever, and the sun reflected the endless white and blinded us to the possibility that there could be anything outside of this strange and beautiful environment. Recording in St. John's, a heavy fog descended on us and we found ourselves in another kind of closed city altogether. Most music exists in a nebulous state somewhere between isolation and interaction; as much as we hope to tell a particular story about seclusion and remoteness with this record, we do so in the spirit of human connection.”
Closed City - an album about the simultaneity of isolation and connection - is out March 28, 2026, on Watch That Ends The Night Records.
Music Composed By Michael Cloud Duguay,
With Lyrics By Mathias Kom, At Hakoniemi, Saimaa Archipelago, Finland
Produced By Mathias Kom And Michael Cloud Duguay
Brass Orchestrated By Natasha Blackwood
Recorded By Michelle Lacouer At First Light, St. John’s Newfoundland
Mixed By Ky Brooks At Error 403, Montreal
Mastered By Matthew Azevedo
Supported By The Canada Council For The Arts
Mathias Kom - Guitar, Synth, Voice
Michael Cloud Duguay - Piano, Organ, Synth, Field Recordings, Voice
Jud Haynes - Bass, Synth
Jacob Cherwick - Drums
Natasha Blackwood - Baritone Saxophone, Synth, Chorus
Nicole Hand - Baritone Saxophone, Bassoon
Terry Campbell - Flugelhorn, Trumpet
Jo Dashney - Bass Trombone
Mara Pellerin - French Horn
Catherine Tansley - Tuba
Fraser Mccurdy - Chorus
Ryan Kennedy - Chorus
Mammu Koskelo - Kantele
Информация по комментариям в разработке