Solar-powered studio captures Newfoundland's church
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- Michael Cloud Duguay, an Ontario composer with a punk and indie rock background, toured Newfoundland in July 2024 with a solar-powered mobile studio, recording pipe organs in small-town churches with minimal online presence
- The resulting album Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go, out July 10, layers organ drones and arpeggios with interviews, saxophones, flutes, bird calls, and wind into what Duguay calls a "sort of audio documentary"
- In Aguathuna, a teenage volunteer led the crew to an electronic organ (keyboard and Leslie cabinets) buried under dusty nativity figurines in the balcony — unused since the 90s — whose reawakening became the opening track "Pond 1"
- The track Damnable Island stacks the same E-flat note as recorded on all seven organs Duguay visited, exploiting micro-variations in pitch from instruments that were sometimes badly out of tune
- The recorded organ samples will be released as MIDI instruments later that summer, extending the project beyond the album itself
- Church members told Duguay their congregations embody the biblical "remnant" — a faithful few who keep painting and maintaining buildings they believe "are going to be here forever" even as attendance declines
Why it matters: The album documents a vanishing soundscape: churches sustained by "two or three elderly people" who see themselves as a faithful remnant, still repainting walls and expecting congregants to return. Releasing the organs as MIDI instruments this summer also gives musicians worldwide access to instruments that exist in communities with almost no web presence at all.
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