Michael Cloud Duguay announces ‘Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go’ and shares first single ‘Winterhouse’, featuring Scions
L-R Jake Nicoll, Andrew MacKelvie, Michael Cloud Duguay and Dave Grenon by Noah Bender
Today, producer and composer Michael Cloud Duguay announces Kingdom Come Kingdom Go out July 10th via imprint Watch That Ends the Night. He also shares the album's first single, ‘Winterhouse’, featuring Scions.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go chronicles seven different church organs found in seven different historic churches scattered in an equal number of remote regions throughout Newfoundland, Canada's easternmost province. With over a year's worth of research prior, connecting with these various outport churches, the album was recorded in just nine days, travelling over 900 miles with a mobile, solar-powered recording studio, The Scamper built into a converted 1970's RV.
Church organs are very distinctive instruments, not only on account of their unmistakable sound but also because of their unique construction. After all, no other major class of instrument can be considered inextricable from the building that houses it. This elision between the instrument's mechanisms and the psychical/ sociocultural space that contains it plays a crucial role in the forthcoming album Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go. Naturally, the organ features prominently throughout the album, but rather than acting as a standard issue record of organ music, it's almost more of an abstract musical documentary about organs.
Ultimately, in July 2024, Duguay's longtime collaborator and owner of The Scamper, Jake Nicoll (who engineered but is also heard on flute and voice), set out on their journey alongside collaborators Andrew MacKelvie (compositions, organ, saxophones, flute, piano, rocks) and Dave Grenon (field recordings, co-engineer and co-producer), and photographer Noah Bender, following the eastern perimeter of the island northward, with stops on coastal islands Greenspond and Fogo, they made their way up to the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula, ending up on Newfoundland's west coast after travelling more than 1500 kilometres.
Each of the seven churches presented its own unique organ scenario, every one of them with its own unusual history. Some instruments had been recently updated to include digital keyboards and amplification, while others hadn't been serviced in 120 years. In an even more extreme case, Duguay and his collaborators had to dig an organ out from beneath a pile of rubble in the upper gallery of a decommissioned church.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go's first offering, ‘Winterhouse’, was recorded on the organ of the Memorial United Church in Bonavista, Newfoundland, and features Cormac Culkeen of Scions - another project of Duguay's, whose debut album To Cry Out In The Wilderness arrived in 2024. The organ's warm, living drone underpins the piece from the outset, a sound less played than breathed, slowly accumulating texture as the track builds. Culkeen's voice enters with the unhurried gravity of traditional sean-nós singing: microtonal, intimate, and faintly ancient, the kind of voice that seems less interested in performance than in disappearance - in that quality Culkeen has described as "self-erasure." Mackelvie's saxophones follow, their lines weaving into the organ and voice until the piece opens into something genuinely vast: majestic, devotional, and quietly overwhelming.
Listen to ‘Winterhouse’ here
In addition to all of the album-focused recording activity, the ensemble also diligently recorded each organ in order to document and archive them as virtual instruments. Not only will these digital replicas permit Duguay and his team to faithfully recreate the material live, they will also be released to the public as free sample packs following the launch of the album.
Equal parts unconventional and alluring Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go unfolds a quietly captivating meditation on community, memory, geography, history, and spirituality, embracing aspects pulled from sacred music, free improvisation, sound art, ambient music and acousmatic techniques. Not unlike the construction of its subject matter - church organs - the album's architecture employs the resonant spaces traced by its detailed sound design to reinforce the beauty of its constituent musical compositions. Steadfastly enigmatic and inquisitive in its orientation, it also remains grounded through the powerful relationships it documents.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is released on July 10th
Pre-order here
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go tracklisting
Pond 1
River of Ponds
Greenspond Tickle
Winterhouse (feat. Scions)
Little Seldom
Pond 2
Tilting (feat. Andrew MacKelvie's Many Worlds)
Change Islands (feat. Andrew MacKelvie's Many Worlds)
Damnable Island
Settlement (feat. Georges E. Sioui)
Pond 3
More about Michael Cloud Duguay
Musician, composer, and producer Michael Cloud Duguay first gained recognition as a vital force within the early 2000’s Canadian DIY music community, contributing to dozens of critically acclaimed recording and performance projects as a producer, arranger, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist.
Following his beloved solo debut Heavy On The Glory (2012), Duguay spent almost a decade grappling with mental illness, substance addiction, and homelessness, but his commitment to music prevailed, ushering in a new era of creativity. His newfound momentum brought on a thirst for exploration that has since led him to expand his practice well beyond his foundation, as evidenced by the present project and his involvement in projects such as Scions, Andrew MacKelvie’s Many Worlds, Quinton Barnes' Black Noise, and Closed City.
Duguay's output frequently explores memory, nostalgia, and location, both metaphorical and in the more literal sense. His fascination with the particular qualities of different spaces and with different collaborative dynamics has led to him to record and create music everywhere from the Yukon Territory’s northernmost fly-in community to the lantern room of mainland Canada’s easternmost lighthouse, and relatedly has prompted him to explore sustainable methods of recording.
In 2024, he launched the new label Watch That Ends The Night with his frequent collaborator, award-winning Halifax-based musician Andrew MacKelvie (New Hermitage, Scions, Jerry Granelli). The imprint's aim is to foster a spirit of experimentalism and collaboration outside of the boundaries of style while steadfastly maintaining a community-minded business model, an ethos that is reflected in its eclectic catalogue.
Connect with Michael Cloud Duguay
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