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Michael Cloud Duguay and his group of friends were nearing the end of their journey to Newfoundland when they encountered chaos in Aguathuna, a town of about 400 people located on a rocky island in the southwest of the Canadian island. For the past week, they have been appearing in old churches in rural areas like this one, setting up their solar-powered studio, with small and large recording equipment, whose intricate patterns of keys, stops, hand keys, pedals, frets and reeds are designed to shake the air around them until it approaches the sound of God.
This was all in the service of the music that was still playing in Duguay’s mind. It would later form the basis of the Ontario-based writer’s new album, Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go, a series of quietly beautiful pieces that serve as a nod to Newfoundland’s organs and the churches from which they originate. The music was created from the recordings Duguay made during the tour in July 2024, of the organs (which the band recorded and will be available as Midi instruments later this summer) and of the church leaders and lay people talking about their lives, as well as saxophones, flutes and any other sounds that happened while the tape was rolling. Listening to your ears on a spring day can be quite visual: are the birds singing, the wind blowing and the people you chat with part of the music or the world outside?
When Duguay and his group arrived at Our Lady of Mercy, a century-old church in Aguathuna, the locals told them that there was no organ there. This upset Mr. Duguay, who had agreed with him in advance someone at church, even planning the trip required so many cold emails and phone calls to strangers that the important point would have been lost in the shuffle. Churches were often small, with no internet access. Finding them took a lot of sleuthing; one time, he was searching Facebook pages for pictures that looked like they might have a rear organ. “They were like, ‘What organ?'” he recalls, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt during a speech at his home in Peterborough. Canada. “I said, ‘This is what we’ve been saying. And they’re like, ‘We’ve never seen an organ in this space.’
Then a young volunteer called out: wasn’t there something like that on the balcony? Of course, surrounded and covered in old church debris – dusty folk statues, old music – there was a keyboard and two Leslie cabinets, old fire speakers whose horns rotated to perfectly mimic the blowing of air through pipes. This was an electronic organ, unlike the instruments that Duguay and his team recorded during the tour, but an organ. They later discovered that it had not been used since the 90s. He set up a couple of microphones to record, dropped one key and played, hoping to be heard.
What he heard was Pond 1, the first single from Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go. One clue comes more suddenly than you might think, due to decades of disuse. It vibrates slowly with the movement of the Leslie speakers, then it fires and restarts itself several times. Slowly Duguay lowers one key, then another, and it grows from one word to another. “We captured the sound of the organ and brought it to life,” he said. I will never hear that sound again, and it was an amazing sound.”
Duguay was raised Catholic, but his current spiritual practice is “self-made”, recovering from a long period of abstinence, neglect to make music, and occasional incarceration. Although they do not share with the interviewees’ Christianityhe wanted to capture the organs in their spiritual and social contexts, just as he would turn a microphone on a rooftop or a dog barking outside to capture physical instruments. Scattered between the drones and arpeggios of Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go and interviews with church members conducted by Duguay while the recording crew was setting up. “A common question was: ‘What do you think will happen with these weapons?'” he says.
“And the repeated response was: ‘They will be here forever because this church will be here forever.’ Because even though not many people are coming to church right now, people will come again.”
These people often spoke to him about the biblical concept of the remnant: a small group of believers who remain faithful as the rest of the world turns to the church. “We were seeing these remnants of two or three old people working in these churches, taking care of them diligently every day, painting everything, and as soon as they finished, they would start again,” he says. “All this is the idea of serving in their community, serving God and serving people who have not yet reached. When the problem of climate and tyranny is growing, one does not have to be a believer to be touched by their hope.
Duguay, whose background is in punk and indie rock, is not a professional singer. He had never worked on one before he started working on Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go. His simple approach to this instrument is best illustrated by the song Damnable Island. For six and a half minutes, you hear a note that vibrates and builds, which the composer achieved by drawing E flat on the seven parts he visited and layering them on top of each other. Some of the equipment was very clear; some had not been taken care of for years. The subtle variations in their pitches help make the sound richer and more unusual than anyone could produce on their own.
This was how Duguay and his team did it: they always drew things without knowing what to do with them, or how they would fit into other parts they had never heard of. In some cases, they were not sure if other parts were available. In other words, the experience of drawing Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go it helped Duguay become like the people the album is about. “We had to think about how to structure music if we wanted multiple parts in one piece,” he says. “‘Well, we’ll draw the following parts on the organ we’ll meet tomorrow or the day after, and we’ll just have to accept whatever it is.’ We couldn’t even imagine what it would sound like. We just had to do some things of faith.”
