Canadian songwriter Mathias Kom (The Burning Hell) and composer Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions, Quinton Barnes’ Black Noise) reunite on Closed City, a collaborative album inspired by Cold War-era “closed cities”—sealed, off-map settlements built around hidden military and industrial work. Out 27 March 2026 via Watch That Ends The Night Records, it fuses their shared interests in avant-metal, drone, musique concrète, folk tradition, and orchestral composition into a tense, atmospheric piece of world-building.
Written during a two-week residency in January 2024 on a remote archipelago in North Karelia, Finland—with occasional involvement from Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo—the record imagines a forgotten city whose residents, shaped by routine and vague labour, recoil further into isolation after the arrival of shadowy figures at the perimeter.
Composed by Duguay, the music threads experimental metal weight through low-brass-heavy orchestration, shaped by an out-of-tune piano battling subzero temperatures and guided by touchstones like 20th-century totalism, Bill Laswell’s collision aesthetics, and John Zorn’s avant-metal explorations. Produced a year later in St. John’s, Newfoundland, it was recorded in a decommissioned church with local collaborators (including a six-piece low-brass ensemble) and mixed by noise musician and scholar Ky Brooks.
With Closed City about to land, Kom and Duguay sound newly reconnected and sharply focused—turning history, landscape, and experimental form into a record where isolation and communication strain against each other. We asked Michael Cloud Duguay about three of their most important influences in our Under the Influence feature…
Svitlana Nianio – ‘Episode III’ from Transylvania Smile
The opening track from this 2023 reissue of the Ukrainian artist’s previously unreleased solo album, released on the Shukai label, an archive record label focused on lost tapes from the Ukrainian 60–90s. When I composed Closed City, I had been listening to Transylvania Smile non stop for six months before seeking out more titles from the label including compilations of work by Cukor Bila Smert (Nianio’s synthwave project), Volodymyr Bystriakov, Oleksandr Yurchenko, and Valentina Goncharova. All of it, remarkable electroacoustic and avant-folk music that had me thinking about the infinite occurrences of folk expression that I’ve never heard/will never hear/am fortunate to discover and which grounded me in thinking of Closed City as a folk project. ‘Episode III’ is a masterclass in minimalism and atmosphere, incredibly sparse in its performance and production but sweeping in its emotional potency – it contains so much. The composition and the recording are vividly wintry and crystalline, it has a chilling effect without being itself frigid; it’s full of life, its folk music. It meanders through a cascading pattern that never resolves but gestures towards many possible resolutions. It’s perfect music that I turned to again and again while I developed this material.
Tongue Depressor and John McCowen – Blame Tuning
I’m a devoted fan of Tongue Depressor and the work of both of its members (double bassist Zach Rowden and pedal steel and lap steel player Henry Birdsey) as well as contrabass clarinetist John McCowen who collaborates with them here. I like everything I’ve ever heard by each of these artists and this collaboration is a standout. This, once again, is material that I would identify as a folk music – Tongue Depressor’s work references gothic americana, western swing, even old time traditions through a sort of avant-garde spectralism that resonates with me as a composer who grew up in a rural place immersed in various forms of folk music, the influence of which is present in everything I create no matter how far away I get from those roots sonically. Their recordings are very rich sound objects, very preceptive reevaluations of ‘heavy’ music which definitely influenced how I was thinking about heavy music as I listened to this on the train in Finland headed to our composition residency.
Divide and Dissolve – ‘Oblique’ from Gas Lit
I first heard this record during peak Canadian winter, peak Covid lockdown, peak music-is-the-only-stabilizing-force era. When I put it on for the first time with no prefatory context the first minute and a half of this exceptional opening track momentarily made me think I was getting into a mid-70s Jan Garbarek ECM style experience, and then the doom commenced. This record is successful in so many ways, not the least of which is its barrage of sonic challenges and aesthetic surprises. An instrumental record, D+D are singular in their command of atmosphere here with a remarkable balance between heavy texture and space in life-affirming music that contains powerful political and social statements. When Mathias and I reconnected later in 2021 – before Closed City was a concept – I learned that he had also been deep into this record, and it was absolutely one that I took notes from when we composed and produced our material. Not just as a touchstone for heavy music, but for sonic worldbuilding and atmosphere.
