Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay share ‘Old Fire’
Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay by Noah Bender
Today, Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom release ‘Old Fire’, the second and longest piece from their forthcoming collaborative album Closed City, out 27th March via Watch That Ends The Night Records.
At nearly eight minutes in length, ‘Old Fire’ occupies a pivotal role early in the album’s sequence, introducing the subterranean industrial core that quietly sustains the imagined settlement at the centre of Closed City. If the opening track establishes the contours of the city itself, ‘Old Fire’ descends beneath it, revealing the ancient furnace that its inhabitants continue to maintain long after its purpose has been forgotten.
Musically, the track is among the album’s most structurally varied. It opens with a restrained, tonal passage before sharply pivoting into something far more volatile: distorted guitars and blastbeat-driven percussion pushing against dense harmonic tension. From there, the piece moves restlessly between extremes, oscillating between wintry ambient passages and sudden bursts of propulsive thrashing. Interspersed brass improvisations cut through the arrangement like shafts of sound, creating abrupt vertical descents within the music’s architecture.
Listen to ‘Old Fire’ here
Speaking on the track, Michael Cloud Duguay said:
“I knew that I wanted to immediately follow the dulcet, tonal introduction with something totally antithetical but complimentary to that. I inverted and extended the established chords and added some tritones for maximum tension, which then felt necessary to relieve in the most dramatic way. We ended up with this piece that oscillates between a wintry ambient soundscape and propulsive thrashing, with the interstitial brass free-playing serving what I envisioned as a mineshaft from the surface to the pits of some unfathomable factory below. Composing this on a 1.5 octave MIDI controller was pretty fun, performing blastbeats especially. It was really fun to work with Jacob Cherwick, the album’s drummer, who enthusiastically stepped up to learn these parts.”
Kom adds:
“This song is about the ‘old fire’ - the unnamed industrial core of the city - that the residents still maintain, despite having long forgotten its purpose.”
The release continues to build the world imagined across Closed City, a concept album shaped by ideas of isolation, enclosure, and the fragile boundary between protection and self-imposed exile.
The album was composed during a two-week artist residency in January 2024 on a remote eastern archipelago in Finland’s North Karelia region. Living and working together in a centuries-old log house under extreme winter conditions, surrounded by frozen islands and remnants of a WWII-era military defence line along the Finnish–Russian border, the pair developed the conceptual and musical framework for Closed City. They were joined at points by Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo, whose presence further grounded the project in the region’s folk traditions.
Kom, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, became particularly drawn to the history of Soviet-era “closed cities”: intentionally isolated settlements removed from official maps, built to house military, mining, or industrial operations, and populated by residents sworn to secrecy. From this research, Closed City imagines a nameless settlement forgotten by the outside world, its inhabitants bound to routine and vague labour, tending an endless fire beneath the city. When shadowy visitors emerge from the surrounding ice fog and press against the city’s glass palisades, the possibility of contact is ultimately rejected, and isolation is reaffirmed.
Listen to ‘Old Fire’ here
Musically, the album was composed by Duguay as an exploratory weave of experimental metal, folk, and orchestral brass, initially guided by the unstable overtones of an out-of-tune piano struggling against the deep January cold. Drawing influence from 20th-century totalism, collision music, and avant-metal lineages, the arrangements mirror Kom’s elliptical lyricism, conveying monotony, anxiety, and fleeting glimpses of life beyond the walls. Low brass features prominently throughout, its broad timbres evoking foghorns and distant signals across extreme weather.
The album was produced a year later in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Kom and Duguay reconvened with a group of local collaborators. Recorded over five days in a decommissioned church and mixed by Canadian noise musician and scholar Ky Brooks, Closed City brings together guitars, synths, piano, field recordings, voice, and a six-piece low-brass ensemble into a cohesive and immersive sound world.
Speaking on the project, Duguay and Kom reflect:
“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 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 is out on 27th March via Watch That Ends The Night.
Closed City tracklist:
City
Old Fire
Palisade
Ice Fog - No Exit
Visitors
Closed City
Closed City credits:
Music composed by Michael Cloud Duguay
Lyrics by Mathias Kom
Produced by Mathias Kom & 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 Matt Azevedo
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts
Closed City personnel:
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
Connect with Michael Cloud Duguay:
Instagram | Website | Bandcamp
Connect with Mathias Kom (The Burning Hell):
Instagram | Website | Bandcamp
