Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay Return After a Decade with Experimental Album Closed City
Transmission 332: Interview with Closed City
Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay are two Canadian musicians who spent much of the 2000s working together before losing contact for the better part of a decade. Kom fronts The Burning Hell and holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology; Duguay composes under his own name and has worked with Scions and Quinton Barnes’ Black Noise. When they reconnected in 2021, both had independently drifted toward experimental and heavy music. The result is Closed City, written during a two-week residency in Finland’s North Karelia in January 2024 and recorded the following year in a decommissioned church in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Artist: Closed City
Release Date: 2026-03-27
Genres: Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music
Label: Watch That Ends The Night Records
Description: Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay discuss Closed City, their experimental metal album inspired by Soviet closed cities, out March 27 on WTETN Records.
The album takes as its subject the Soviet-era closed cities — deliberately isolated settlements removed from official maps, built around military and industrial operations, their residents sworn to secrecy. Duguay’s music draws on experimental metal, drone, musique concrète, and low brass arrangements; Kom’s lyrics construct an unnamed city whose inhabitants have long forgotten why they are there. Closed City is out March 27, 2026 on Watch That Ends The Night Records.
What first attracted you to making music, and what were your earliest musical influences?
MK: As a very small child I was never discouraged from making noise. My parents were very patient. And I loved the power and the unpredictability of sound, whether bashing on my father’s classical guitar or twanging on metal doorstops. I think I learned at such a young age that making music was something playful that I’ve never entirely lost the sense of wonder embedded in creating something out of nothing.
MCD: When I was four years old I had corrective eye surgery and was required to wear patches over both of my eyes while I recovered. My memories of this time are vivid and abstract – colours and sound. I was so young that my memory is that this period of temporary blindness lasted for years when in fact it was only a few months. My grandfather gifted me a portable radio that I carried with me everywhere while I was wheeled around; music and sound were what tethered me to consciousness. It was such an intense experience at a formative age, it definitely heightened my sense of hearing, my appreciation for depth and texture in sound, and my instinctive response to music. I was a late bloomer, relatively speaking, when it came to playing music but when, as an adolescent, I learned how to shape and organize sounds into what I wanted to hear, and in turn gained some control over my experience of life, it was revelatory. Music was also the first instance in my life where I found community, and community is what has anchored me in music ever since.
“Music was also the first instance in my life where I found community, and community is what has anchored me in music ever since.”
After ten years apart, why was this the right project to reunite for?
MK: We discovered that we’d both been drawn back into the world of heavy music after many years of doing other things, and it was Michael‘s suggestion that we explore that together. I think we’re both so omnivorous when it comes to music that we could have easily ended up doing something entirely different, with other sounds and other genre touchstones, but this collaboration came easily.
MCD: I don’t think that Mathias and I could be left alone in a room together without starting a project; creation is reflexive for both of us, and collaboration is fundamental to our friendship. When we reconnected as friends we hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade – we had a lot of records to recommend to one another. A parallel was that we had both been listening not only to a lot of heavy music, but also specifically exploratory and experimental heavy music. This shared interest surfaced at the same time that we started discussing a collaboration, so it was obvious. I think, importantly, we both really wanted to try something different than the other work we had been creating, for various and different reasons. That I already had a residency booked in remote, rural Finland sort of sealed the deal. How could we not?
What did you discover about each other’s creative process that surprised you most?
MK: I always knew Michael as someone with the ability to hyperfocus once he starts on a project or a task, but I was still amazed to wake up every morning in Finland – quite early – and find that he had woken up even earlier and was already deep in the process of composing or revising. He has an incredible ability to hear multiple layers of parts, instrumentation, and timbres in his mind and make them take shape and make sense very quickly. I think one thing I was happy to find that we share is an interest in absorbing environments and translating them into musical influence, so going snowshoeing on the frozen lakes around our cabin, watching the light refract through the icicles on the pine trees, even constantly stoking the wood fire that kept us from freezing ourselves – all of these experiences ended up in the music somehow.
MCD: Mathias is a famously gifted lyricist and very adroit. It was remarkable to observe him develop an imagined world in real-time as the writing progressed, based on the very small amount of oblique information he had about this specific history. For every detail he shared with me about the content of his lyrics and narrative, I could sense the outline of all of the world building that had gone into these little glimpses I was getting. He often describes simple concepts or tells simple stories in his songs through really complex forms, but this was an inversion of that approach. His lyrics were notably precise and uncomplicated in their length and form, but represented huge ideas that were left faint and foggy. His writing here is both impressionistic and lucid, which is hard to do, and I was surprised and excited by this different approach he took.
“It was uncanny, and this effect inspired me to compose work that illuminated familiar forms in unusual ways, to create a sort of unknown familiarity, or a jamais vu effect, with and in the music.”
How did the Finnish winter cold physically change the speed of the music?
MCD: The cold definitely impacted me and the writing, but the temperature was not actually so different from where I live in Canada, so I wasn’t affected as much by any big differences as by small, eerie ones. I’ve spent a lot of time in northern places but none where both the climate and the terrain are so similar to home. The trees were older, taller, grew different foliage, and the branches began higher up the trunk there. This altered the quality of light beneath the canopy and cast this landscape that looked otherwise so familiar in an unusual, surreal glow. It was uncanny, and this effect inspired me to compose work that illuminated familiar forms in unusual ways, to create a sort of unknown familiarity, or a jamais vu effect, with and in the music. This can be enhanced with the addition of musique concrète techniques – merging sounds that human ears aren’t accustomed to hearing concurrently, or manipulating the perception of proximity to a sound, can produce disorientation, even if those constituent sounds are unmistakable. It was a fun way to play with perspective. The Finnish winter had this effect on my perception and perspective, which shows up in the music through its speed and other compositional methods.
Why was it important to leave the tensions and clashing elements in the songs “unresolved”?
MK: I can’t speak to Michael‘s own compositional ideas here, but the whole concept of a closed city is, to me, an unresolved question. Was such extremity in design, such political and military secrecy, really necessary? I grew up in the end of the long shadow of the Cold War, and the historical weight of that era is very heavy – but it’s also almost mythical at this point. Closed cities seem like science fiction as much as real history to me, and it’s incredible that so many real lives have been lived under such conditions. How can people do it? Can we get used to anything?
MCD: Unresolved tension is so difficult to process because it’s equivocal, but not necessarily foreboding. It produces an unknowing which inherently contains some hope along with fear and anxiety. It’s possible that something bright and mellifluous is waiting just beyond the final measure. It’s nice to let an audience use their imagination. I heard different resolutions every time I revisited these moments which means I heard a different piece of music each time. That’s a really exciting feeling both as a composer and as a listener.
“Commercial labels are vampiric by design, they suck the life out of the art and artists that they come into contact with.”
How did the acoustics of a decommissioned church in St. John’s change the “inward” music you wrote in Finland?
MCD: Our intention was always to record in a church – I record most of my projects in large resonant spaces like churches – so I was composing with those acoustics in mind. I love working in these unpredictable, uncontrolled spaces which is, in itself, a macro approach of field recording, and the church is present on the record in more ways than just the resonance. Many of the field recordings included on the album are from fortuitous moments from around the album production – when we arrived there was major construction going on outside the church, another day the security alarm was set off, and – probably one of the top favourite musical moments of my life – one day a bird got stuck in the church’s HVAC system and was flying around inside trying to escape, creating some of the most unique noises I’ve ever heard; both animal and industrial. The bird escaped unharmed and survived. In each instance, the space’s administration was very apologetic about the interruptions, but in each instance we were able to capture some pretty special sounds that intersected really concisely with the themes of the project. This sort of thing is a central motivation for working in unconventional production spaces.
Were there any specific films or books that helped you visualize this “Closed City”?
MK: I read a lot of postapocalyptic speculative fiction, and a lot of that imagery helped me imagine a fictionalized, exaggerated version of a closed city. Two specific touchstones for me were Victoria Fiore‘s short documentary My Deadly, Beautiful City, about the closed city of Norilsk, as well as the Russell Hoban novel Riddley Walker. It’s one of my all-time favourite books, and though it’s got nothing to do with any sort of city (it takes place in a rural, post-nuclear wasteland), I’ve always loved the way that Hoban managed to capture the sense of a population that doesn’t entirely understand their environment, which resonated with me in this project.
Was it difficult to open this “Closed City” to other collaborators after the initial isolation?
MK: I admit it did feel strange to open this project up to a big group of collaborators after a year of it existing mostly just in our minds and on some demo recordings that we didn’t share with anyone. But as soon as the music started coming to life, it was a really joyful experience for me.
MCD: Travelling to compose in remote Finland meant travelling with a very compact and limited setup. The piano in the residency space was wildly out of tune (even after a local piano tuner did everything he could to tame it), so this material was composed almost entirely in the box with VSTs and a two octave midi-controller, something I’ve never done exclusively before. This was both limiting and empowering. It opened doors to different ideas than working strictly with an acoustic instrument would have, but it also had some funny outcomes when I brought the material to the ensemble. It’s one thing to program four straight minutes of blast beats in a DAW; it’s another thing for a human drummer to perform that (Jacob killed it, though). We had to rephrase some chord voicings on the brass because I had included a few notes that were physically impossible to play. It was really great to hear it all come alive, though, especially the brass ensemble performance.
“Unresolved tension is so difficult to process because it’s equivocal, but not necessarily foreboding. It produces an unknowing which inherently contains some hope along with fear and anxiety.”
How does Closed City define the mission of your new label, Watch That Ends The Night?
MCD: I started WTETN in 2024 after a few really bad experiences working with commercial record labels as an artist. Commercial labels are vampiric by design, they suck the life out of the art and artists that they come into contact with. My colleague Andrew MacKelvie and I wanted to create an independent project that performs the opposite – that gives life to projects, helps usher music into the world that might not otherwise receive label support. We operate on an artist-centered, break-even model. Aside from working with friends and community members, we want to highlight work that is being produced outside of major cities in Canada, and which foregrounds immersive collaboration and innovative production approaches. Closed City has embodied all of these themes and priorities; I would have released it even if I hadn’t made it.
Is Closed City a one-off project, or do you see it opening into a longer, ongoing collaboration?
MCD: We might fall out of touch for another decade but I am confident that Mathias and I will create music together for the rest of our lives.
Photos courtesy of Closed City
Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others
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