Michael Cloud Duguay – KINGDOM COME, KINGDOM GO – Live Concert at Dënäkär Zho / KIAC Ballroom
Michael Cloud Duguay – KINGDOM COME, KINGDOM GO
Doors open – 7:30 / Performance – 8:00
Co-presented by Jazz Yukon
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In June, 2024, Canadian composer Michael Cloud Duguay and collaborators travelled over 1,500km across Newfoundland in a self-built, solar-powered mobile studio, recording seven historic church organs in seven remote communities, resulting in one of the most unique and imaginative albums ever produced in Canada.
At each stop, the ensemble encountered remarkably different organs with unusual histories. Some were acoustic, hand-cranked instruments while others relied on foot pedals to generate sound. Some were recently updated and featured digital keyboards and amplifiers. One had not been tuned in 120 years; another was buried beneath a pile of rubble in the upper gallery of a decommissioned Catholic church.
While the foundation for the project’s material began with compositions and improvisational experiments, the team’s collective interest in field recording, spontaneous composition, and responding to their environments shaped the work and enhanced its development. Duguay conducted a series of interviews with church wardens, reverends, congregants, and community members at each location. These interviews explored, from a secular perspective, the history of the churches and foregrounded the progressive vanishing of these instruments as churches are shuttered while congregations decrease.
— In addition to all of the album-focused recording activity, the ensemble also diligently recorded each organ that appears on the album in order to document and archive them as digital midi instruments. These midi instruments will be released as sample packs to accompany the release of the album, available for free to musicians, composers, and producers around the world for creative use. Duguay + his collaborators (Andrew MacKelvie, Markus Lake, Dave Grenon) will be touring and performing this material across Canada in Fall, 2026, putting to use the digital organ emulators that were designed and constructed by the team’s engineers. Thus, the live performance does not require an actual pipe organ. Interpretations of the album material will be reproduced on digital instruments that precisely replicate the sound of the various organs and churches heard on the album, accompanied by saxophone, photo, and live sound design and processing.
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