Beautiful, often elegiac soundworlds bloom in morning sunlight, tones flickering in the distance like a dancing mirage. Voices are more than words. Time is a collaborator. Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a breathtaking achievement from Michael Cloud Duguay and his crew. For music that holds so much weight in its flowing chord progressions and stoic drones, there’s an infectious joy embedded in this work. For Duguay, Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is far more than just an album or even a sound project. There is the camaraderie and friendship that comes with this kind of collaboration that sparkles in the quiet moments and in the resonant echoes encasing all of these 11 songs.
Duguay recorded it in nine days, traveling over 1500 kilometers up Newfoundland’s coast in The Scamper, a solar-powered studio built into an old, converted RV, joined by engineer and Scamper owner Jake Nicoll, saxophonist Andrew MacKelvie, field recordist Dave Grenon, and photographer Noah Bender. Other friends joined along the way, too, but the focus stayed fixed: seven churches, seven organs, each with its own history and its own life to document. Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is the result, sacred music and incidental noise sharing the same breaths in the same room, never separated.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is out now on Duguay’s Watch That Ends The Night Records. I can’t possibly recommend it enough.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories?
I had a unique experience as a child – my earliest memories are exclusively sound. I was born cross-eyed, and by the time I turned four, I required corrective eye surgery. Post-operation, I recovered with eye patches protecting both of my eyes for a number of months – all of my earliest memories are from this time and, aside from psychedelic blotches of cascading colours, they’re all sonic. My grandfather gifted me a portable Radio Shack radio that accompanied me everywhere during this time, so I remember the sound of late 80s Canadian commercial rock radio – Rush, Bryan Adams, Tom Cochrane, Allanah Myles – as my lifeline to the world, my grandfather’s deep baritone, my twin sister’s voice. I didn’t grow up immersed in music and art, but this was a very specific sort of immersion in sound, and I credit this formative experience as what brought me here, to music and sound art.
How did you first find your way into making music and composing? Were there any certain records or artists that made you want to start making your own stuff?
I discovered it on my own; I’m self-taught. I started playing with cheap keyboards when I was 10 or 11 and was immediately engrossed not only by the piano keyboard but by all of the rhythmic and accompaniment functions, the voice banks, simple sequencers, multitasking while playing to add or omit syncopated rhythms and drum fills and bass movement. I was curious about arranging and dynamics along with composing and songwriting, as well as this fascination with pushing buttons and flicking switches. It’s not unlike organ performance, the multi-functioning, or playing the accordion, which I also do. As a child, I really loved artists and titles from New Age labels like Narada and Windham Hill, CDs that were seemingly ubiquitous back then. Artists like David Lanz, David Arkenstone, George Winston, who I still love. I taught myself Lanz’s Return to the Heart and essentially developed an interpolation of it on my Concertmate with a backbeat behind it; a sort of remix, maybe. This is hilarious to reflect on; I was such a weird kid. I’ve actually been thinking about making a record on that keyboard; I still have it; maybe I will try to licence that David Lanz piece. But I loved that contemplative and atmospheric new age and contemporary Americana-ish solo piano stuff, and it really opened my ears and guided me towards solo jazz piano like Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, which led me to Monk and McCoy Tyner and then Cecil Taylor and then everything else. That initial influence is definitely still present in my work. I think that sort of vaguely classical new age melodicism influenced my pop leanings a lot more than radio pop music from my childhood.
So you’ve got this massive new record – well, project really, because it’s so much more than a record – Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go coming out. Nine days, seven churches, 1500 kilometres. I’d love to hear what that journey was actually like on the ground. What did a typical day look like?
The simple answer is that it was extremely fun. On one hand, we were pursuing this serious and deliberate, government-funded recording project with institutional support from the Royal Canadian College of Organists, but it was also a road trip across an incredibly beautiful province with four of my favourite people and musicians in the world. I’m an early riser; a typical day would begin with stretching and deep-listening, making coffee and breakfast for the crew, and then getting a walk in while the others woke up. I love the experience of waking up in a different place every day, but I don’t tour as a performer much, so this satisfied that desire, and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that most days I woke up in one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. I had spent a decent amount of time in Newfoundland prior to this project, but had rarely ventured off the highway outside of the larger city centres. Each day was different, but generally speaking, we would collectively check in on our day’s itinerary and hit the road, some days driving longer than others, until we got to whichever church we were working in that day. The churches themselves were all incredibly beautiful, as well – mostly gigantic wooden structures in the centre of whatever community we were in. Each day we were greeted by some generous representative of that church community – often bemused by what we were doing but very happy to let us do it – and, as part of the project, we were conducting interviews with various community members. I would spend this time building some trust and rapport with whoever I was going to interview while the engineers were setting up. Jake and Dave got very good at rolling up, unloading, and setting up our entire rig before I was even done chatting with a warden or reverend. I’d get to know the organ while we decided how to record it. We’d listen to the room, discern what voices we were hearing – wind in the rafters, creaky pews, traffic outside – and decide how to work with that. One day, there was a family reunion taking place outside a church, so we mic’d that up with the family’s consent – you can hear it on Greenspond Tickle. Then we would decide which of our material we wanted to record that day, guided by the organ’s character, tuning, and these environmental factors. The recording hours were long, and our experience of that time was also framed by our use of solar power; we had to keep an eye on our remaining solar-generated power, which was actually a lot more fun than it was stressful. In addition to organ, we would record saxophone or fiddle or piano, whatever was on our list and sounded great in that space. I’d often conduct interviews while Jake and Dave recorded Andrew, and those interviews were a big highlight – I heard incredible stories told by amazing people; I was moved to tears more than once. Each day, we would also record one new texture for Damnable Island, which is a composition for organs in 7 different churches, exploring the microtonal varieties of the tuning of these instruments as we layered the same note performed on each instrument on top of one another. And then, we would record the organs for our MIDI archiving project – one of us would play each note on each organ, one at a time, to capture the entire range of the keyboard, and then we’d zap a mega-loud sine wave into the church to capture an impulse response recording and map the reverberance. This is often around the time we would get some curious onlookers. We would wrap up, thank whoever had given us a key for the day, and drive an hour or so in the direction of our next location before arriving at our accommodations, have a drink, and pass out.
Throughout all of this, there were beautiful walks together, amazing food, ferry rides, new friends, swims, breaking down on the side of the highway in a national park, getting that sorted by extremely gracious locals, waterfalls, whales, lots and lots of hanging out. Our friends Maria and Pam joined for a couple of nights; Andrew’s Dad, Jim, was with us for a couple of days. It was a great experience. This is how I want to make records, this is how I want to spend my time.
The organs themselves are such specific, place-bound instruments. No two are the same, and they can’t really be separated from the buildings that house them. Was there a moment during recording where that felt genuinely overwhelming, where the weight of what you were trying to capture hit you?
This was such a generative, emergent, and unpredictable process that there was no real opportunity to become overwhelmed by the weight of the concept. In fact, much of the idea of what we were trying to capture was emerging through the process itself, and though many of the themes we were discovering – loss, grief, the climate crisis – are inherently weighty, we were examining them through a fun and challenging process that permitted compartmentalization. Each day was focused on that day, that church, that community, that instrument. It was pointless to think much about the next day because we truly had no idea what we were going to encounter, and we were having fun in the moment. It was, generally speaking, an exercise in faith, mindfulness, and acceptance, which are spiritual practices I am already accustomed to mobilizing in order to combat feeling overwhelmed, so I moved through this with a pretty clear head.
One organ hadn’t been serviced in 120 years. Another had to be dug out from under rubble. Did the condition of an instrument change what the music became, or did you find ways to work around the limitations?
We worked with the idiosyncrasies of each instrument as a guiding principle of the project. I knew we would be encountering microtonal, if not tonal, differences from instrument to instrument, so material was composed with this in mind. ‘Damnable Island’, for example, is simply the same note played on every organ we met. Physical and structural characteristics of the instruments became their own instruments and parts in the material – the wooden handcrank and bellows heard on ‘River of Ponds’. The first sound you hear on the album is the sound of the organ that had been dug out being turned on for the first time in decades with a chord held on the keyboard. In fact, the real surprise was the beautifully maintained digital organ in Bonavista with perfect concert tuning that I recorded ‘Winterhouse’ on. That piece was intended to be a microtonal piece, and in this case I actually had to alter the composition and performance to accommodate an unexpectedly perfectly tuned organ. It radically altered the music – in this case, the ‘limitation’, as it were, was the unexpectedly perfectly maintained instrument, which raises all sorts of interesting subsequent lines of thinking.
Cormac Culkeen has talked about “self-erasure” as a quality he’s after in his singing. That’s a striking concept to bring into a project about spaces that are themselves disappearing or deconsecrated. Did that idea resonate with what you were trying to do more broadly?
For sure. This album is about the instruments and their environments, not me or even the compositions themselves. These compositions come from multiple sources – me, Andrew MacKelvie, Georges E. Sioui, improvisation – and of course they are present, but their purpose is as tools – they’re stethoscopes that allowed us to identify and examine and translate the depths of these instruments and spaces into something relatively familiar and decipherable. The songs are containers for our findings, a means of expression; they’re the language that we are telling a story in. I didn’t want to get between the story and the audience, because I’m in the audience, witnessing this story, as well.
The decision to document and archive each organ as a virtual instrument and then release them as free sample packs is a really interesting idea. These instruments exist in such specific, unrepeatable places. What does it mean to make them portable?
This idea came from Jake, who engineered the project and built the Scamper and a lot of the gear inside of it. He had an interest in archiving these instruments, mostly just as a technical and creative experiment. But, as with a lot of this project, this experiment took on a lot more meaning as the project progressed. For them to be made portable has some utility – we can faithfully recreate this material live, if we wish to. But, more importantly, it allows for further experimentation by us and others – experimentation as simple as playing the sound of the organ from one church through the resonance of another church. Hypothetically, it could be of sentimental value to past and current congregants of those churches, folks familiar with those organs. With the record, I was meticulous about not disembodying the instruments – recorded exactly as they sounded at that time on that day – from their environment, but now there is the opportunity to hear what happens when we do.
How did Dave Grenon’s field recordings factor into the album’s architecture? I’m curious how the environmental sound and the music were allowed to interact.
Dave hears things differently than I do, which is one of many reasons I like to work with him. In fact, he simply hears things that I do not hear, and vice versa. His field recordings were integrated in the editing stage of this project, which was essentially a second composition stage, but we had a sense of where many field recordings would go, employed parallel to the sound of the organ from the environment they were captured in. Often, the field recordings were enhancing sounds that were present in the spaces. When one church had a noisy nest of baby birds in the rafters, we got as close to them as we safely could and recorded them, instead of trying to hide their sounds in the other recordings. When we reintroduced them to the compositions, it was almost like performing on another instrument. In the case of the baby birds, they actually sound like an instrument, like a modular synth tone that I could spend the rest of my life trying and failing to patch in. So, often he was capturing sounds we were all hearing, but sometimes he was seeking out sounds independently and surprised me with them later.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go touches sacred music, free improvisation, ambient, acousmatic techniques. Was there ever a point where you felt the album pulling in too many directions, or did the physical journey give it enough of a spine?
Come to think of it, we never discussed genre with this project – the sounds, and however they might be classified, are just the outcome of our respective interests. I work primarily in totalist and post-minimalist traditions, Andrew comes from jazz, Jake is a folk songwriter, Dave is an experimental sound designer. We all love drone; we all belong to an orchestral drone ensemble (Scions). Our conceptual and technical interests informed these sounds, more than anything, far more than our respective backgrounds working in different music traditions. So, it only ever felt like it was moving forward in one direction because we were all guiding it along with shared intention built from our collective interests. The journey gave it a spine, but the camaraderie and trust in one another gave it its heart.
I also want to ask, briefly, about your record label, Watch That Ends That Night. First – what’s the story behind the name? It’s so great.
Thank you! We really like it. There is no way to be brief in telling that story, but I’m going to tell it because we’ve never shared it publicly and it’s a good story.
In early 2019, I wrote a song named ‘The Watch That Ends The Night’ which was inspired by the experience of a friend of mine who had moved across Canada, from the prairies to the Maritimes, and opened a bar in Halifax named ‘The Watch That Ends The Night’. He was a fellow musician, a rapper whom I had known for a decade; we had met at a music festival around 2008 and hosted concerts for each other in our respective cities. His restaurant was named after the novel ‘The Watch That Ends The Night’ by the 20th-century Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan. It’s a brilliant novel that takes place in Montreal and explores themes of love, loss, and the impact of political ideologies in human lives, contrasting the brevity and struggle of those lives with the eternity of God. The title of the novel is a reference to a line in the hymn ‘Our God, Our Help In Ages Past’ (which I interpolated in my song), which itself references a line in Psalm 90 in the Christian bible.
My friend’s bar was short-lived but extremely successful throughout its short life, voted Canada’s best new bar in 2018. I never actually got the chance to go, and was surprised to learn that it had suddenly closed. Shortly after they announced their closure, my friend made a public statement sort of loosely about why it was closing but more generally about the idea of trying to reinstitute the recklessness and enthusiasm of youth later in one’s life, and the trap of nostalgia and yearning for the past in the face of the gravity of the present. I was really, really moved by how he articulated this, and I wrote this song about these ideas he presented.
That song was intended to be included on an album of the same name that I recorded in the Yukon Territory of Canada in 2018-2020. While I was making that album with my friend, the great engineer and producer Jordy Walker, we determined that the material required some saxophone, but there weren’t any saxophonists in that region of Canada. Jordy mentioned that a great player he knew, Andrew MacKelvie, lived on the other side of the country in Halifax, but semi-regularly came to the Yukon to work with regional artists. He got in touch with Andrew, and it turned out that Andrew was headed there a few months later. The two of us connected via Jordy; he played on the material while he was there, but I was home in Ontario. We totally hit it off long-distance and immediately started planning other projects before the pandemic stalled us out. We stayed in touch, worked remotely on a bunch of ideas, and eventually met a few years later once the lockdowns had subsided. That album got sidelined by a bad label and management situation I had going on then, and I’ve never released it, but when, in 2024, Andrew and I decided to start a label together to frame a house for all of our projects and our friends’ projects, we named it after the album that precipitated our first encounter.
There are all sorts of synchronistic and uncanny themes that weave through that novel: my friend’s experience with his bar, mine and Andrew’s friendship, my lost record, and the hymn. The short and inscrutable answer to your questions is that Watch That Ends The Night is a label named after an album named after a song named after a bar named after a novel named after a line from a hymn named after scripture.
What’s your sort of philosophy or approach on what gets released on the label?
It’s very relationship-oriented; we work with friends. At first, we were just planning to release our own records, or records that I was producing with other artists around that time like Quinton Barnes, and things organically developed from there. That record, Black Noise, and its outcomes exemplify how things have developed with WTETN – we made that record and released it, and then the label subsequently released records by Egyptian Cotton Arkestra and Edward Enman, two completely different projects that both contributed to the Black Noise project. A large group of us did a really fun tour of Europe performing that material last November. We captured a moment in time, and now we are all doing other things. We’ve done a lot of one-off experiments, which is not something labels are always willing to invest time or money in because there’s no commercially viable future in it, but they’re all constituent pieces of this larger creative project.
We are working with people we know and are in community with and trust and love, and whose music we have loved for a long time. We consciously don’t limit ourselves to any genre designations but value and stand behind artists and music that embodies authentic creative expression. We’ve only released music by artists based in Canada. It has always been a challenge for artists working in Canada to gain visibility outside of here, and we are doing what we can to build new relationships and provide infrastructure that can help folks obtain that, if that’s what they want. We treat each release differently and tailor our services to the needs and desires of each respective artist.
We joke that our label exists to put out music by our friends who can’t find a label to release their music, but it’s not entirely untrue. There are a lot of forces stacked against artists finding label support, and a lot of folks in our community don’t want to work with traditional labels. I sure don’t. I’m very grateful to have worked with some of my heroes, legends like Alex Lukashevsky, pinksnail, and Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and supported a number of artists’ debut albums – Fittonia, Liam Cole, Cloud Circuit, and, notably, Georges E. Siou, who just released his first album at the age of 77. Georges’ project is a prime example of our philosophy – he’s been writing music, incredible music, since the 1960s, but it was very unlikely that he would ever record and release it. He and I met, we found the resources to make it, and we made it. Now, Georges is one of my best friends and one of his compositions is included on this album, Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go. We’re just contributing to his collective web that’s been woven for much longer than we’ve been around, and will continue to weave itself forward long after we are done.
What are you most excited about right now in relation to the label?
It’s exciting to witness the outcomes of collective community-building through creative expression and collaboration. To see a lot of musicians appearing on multiple records in our catalogue, across genre and region. In many cases, this is just documentation of a scene, but in others it’s affirming to know that folks met through our label and label projects, and are going on to collaborate with one another in different, interesting ways, for projects that are appearing both on the label and elsewhere. Andrew and I both live and work in smaller, more remote communities, and part of our mandate has always been to seek out and release music by artists from rural regions of Ontario and Nova Scotia. This has taken time to nurture and cultivate, but it’s starting to bear fruit. Next January we will release the second installment in our annual release series, Two Solitudes, which is a tape series that features an artist from rural Ontario on one side and an artist from Nova Scotia on the other.
And then, lastly to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
This list has no end, so I’ll just pick one. In 2022, I was an artist in residence at the Gamli Skoli residency in Hrisey, Iceland – an island in the northernmost archipelago of Iceland. It was a pretty noisy place – windy, surrounded by the Arctic Ocean – and I spent a lot of time walking around with my field recording kit, capturing the sounds. I kept detecting a distant, unidentifiable sound through my monitors – it sounded like a shaker, or like paper crinkling, white noise but not static. I thought it might be a waterfall. I sought it out and discovered that it was thousands of stockfish, cod, and haddock, hung in massive open-air structures to cure in the ocean air, rattling against one another and producing this massive, gorgeous, totally enigmatic sound. I knew that this was a fishing community, but, with no reference, I was not expecting this source. It was moving to stand in the middle of it and be immersed entirely in this specific sound I had never heard before. I’m always chasing those new sounds.
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