Baba Yaga's Hut Presents:
Quinton Barnes & Black Noise Ensemble
Quinton Barnes is a relentlessly ambitious Montreal-based artist exploring the edges of Canada's music scene. Since 2018, he's built a unique sound, writing, rapping, singing, producing, mixing, and mastering his own work across a prolific discography. For his new album, Black Noise, produced by Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions), releasing June 6 on Watch That Ends The Night Records, Barnes took an assuredly different approach than with his past work, resulting in a release that, while in staunch keeping with his radically innovate methods of expression, presents a bold sonic evolution and showcases the talents and efforts of a diverse collective of Montreal-based artists and musicians in collaboration.
In late 2022, on the heels of the release of his For the Love of Drugs album, Quinton Barnes casually tweeted ‘I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity ... not sure how yet but the idea is there’. The tweet was spotted by an acquaintance of Barnes, Ontario-based composer/producer Michael Cloud Duguay, who immediately saw vast creative potential in the idea. Widely acclaimed for his panoramic and idiosyncratic approach to developing highly stylized albums with live ensembles, Duguay reached out to Barnes and offered to collaborate on this project, applying his existing methods of curation, collaboration, and creative distillation to the artist’s vision, and the two began developing the concept for Black Noise.
Inspired by Afropessimist thought and the work of French Economist Jacques Attali, Barnes became interested in noise and the function that it can serve, particularly within the context of Black music, and hoped to situate noise within a context of black cultural expression, fusing soul and gospel-inspired vocals with noise, rapping with noise, and pushing the limits of black genres to an aesthetic and sonic brink. Taking notes, Duguay curated an ensemble out of experienced noise performers and free improvisers living and working in Montreal including members of anti-colonial free jazz quarter Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, experimental reedist and instrument maker Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and audio engineer Ky Brooks. Sessions were booked at the legendary Hotel2Tango studio, a nexus of creative expression in Montreal that has housed sessions for notable releases by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Arcade Fire, Big Brave, and more. The creative process began with Barnes and Duguay commissioning and recording a suite of original classical piano music composed by Montreal based pianist Edward Enman. This material was then sampled, manipulated, and deconstructed to build foundations for lyric-writing and improvised ensemble performance in-studio. This process intentionally contrasted the institutions and imperialist practices of western music with the traditions of Black musical expression by taking a standard western tradition and exploiting its resources for destruction and reclamation.
With funding from The Canada Council for the Arts, the ensemble assembled in Montreal in November, 2024, just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in America. With the spectre of explicit fascism casting a tense shadow over the sessions, the collective came together every day for a week, using the manipulated piano suite recordings as a guide to improvisation and spontaneous composition. Collaboratively exploring different iterations of ‘noise’ through the lens of Barnes’ Black Noise theories and Duguay’s tightly conceptualized creative process, Black Noise coalesced piece by piece. The album’s material ranges from deconstructed acid funk (Black Noise) to an avant-garde post-rock cum footwork tribute to the late new music composer Julius Eastman (What Would Eastman Do?), harsh noise (Art of Survival), frenetic breakbeat (Sober for the Weekend), orchestral drone (Quiet Noise), to Barnes’ most heartbreakingly beautiful ballad work yet on the album closer, Movement 7. Foregrounded throughout is Barnes’ patently potent lyricism and dynamic vocal performance, exploring themes including black nihilism, overlooked black genius, precarity and poverty, grief, and triumph. With a world-class ensemble of instrumentalists supporting him, and Duguay’s refined penchant for sonic worldbuilding, Quinton Barnes has accomplished something unprecedented in both conceptual scope and delivery. Black Noise stands alone not only in its enigmatic approach to genre fusion and collaboration but as a recorded document that undeniably situates noise, creatively and intellectually, within a context of Black cultural expression outside of the trappings of so-called ‘conscious hip-hop’. Black Noise represents something undeniably new not only in Barnes’ rapidly developing oeuvre, but in the canons of hip-hop and experimental music.
Presented by Baba Yaga's Hut.
This is an 18+ event
