Michael Cloud Duguay & Mathias Kom

Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom announce new collaborative project and album: Closed City & share debut single "Ice Fog - No Exit" via Watch That Ends The Night.

Today, Canadian producer/composer Michael Cloud Duguay and songwriter Mathias Kom announce details of their new collaborative project and album, Closed City, out 27th March via Watch That Ends The Night, alongside the release of its debut single, “Ice Fog - No Exit”.

Closed City brings together two artists whose paths first crossed during a prolific era of collaboration in the 2000s, before diverging for more than a decade. Reconnecting in 2021, Duguay (Scions, Quinton Barnes’ Black Noise) and Kom (The Burning Hell) conceived a project rooted in shared sonic interests spanning avant-metal traditions, drone, musique concrète, folk forms, and orchestral composition.

What followed is a tightly executed conceptual album concerned with world-building, isolation, and the uneasy coexistence of connection and withdrawal.

The first single, “Ice Fog - No Exit”, appears midway through Closed City as a seven-and-a-half-minute piece anchored by balladic piano and a uniquely song-led sense of momentum. Muted, repeated chords give the track a pulse that draws quietly on mutated pop and folk forms, as it’s slowed, weighted, and expanded into something abstractly resembling orchestral prog metal.

The music oscillates between compression and release - guitars, drums, brass, and synths accumulating into dense, opaque passages before clearing space again - while the piano remains the track’s orienting force, reasserting melodic and rhythmic direction as it propulses toward a final movement that feels broader, brighter, and more outward-facing than anything else on the record.

Within an album defined by enclosure and resistance, it stands out as its most expansive and quietly hopeful moment.

Speaking on "Ice Fog - No Exit", Duguay said:

"My taste in rock and popular music leans heavily towards totalist melodrama - The Smashing Pumpkins, Van Dyke Parks, Bruce Hornsby, Prince - and I wanted to push some themes of my practice as far as I could with an epic through-composed ballad that incorporated rhythmic complexity and high-level melodic drama as the penultimate climax of the record.

Mathias gets the credit for taking this to that place with his beautiful, soaring vocal melodies contrasting with the intense sprechgesang in the middle section. This piece is the most obvious coalescence of our respective approaches to writing; it’s maybe my favourite thing I’ve ever

composed.

In three sections, the lyrics describe the arrival of a group of unnamed visitors to the outside of the city’s glass walls, the tension between the obvious presence of the visitors and the refusal of the residents to believe that they exist, and ultimately the blurring of distinctions between each

group."

The album was composed during a two-week artist residency in January 2024 on a remote eastern archipelago in Finland’s North Karelia region. Living and working together in a centuries-old log house under extreme winter conditions, surrounded by frozen islands and remnants of a WWII-era military defence line along the Finnish-Russian border, the pair developed the conceptual and musical framework for Closed City.

They were joined at points by Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo, whose presence further grounded the project in the region’s folk traditions.

Kom, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, became particularly drawn to the history of Soviet-era “closed cities”: intentionally isolated settlements removed from official maps, built to house military, mining, or industrial operations, and populated by residents sworn to secrecy. From this research, Closed City imagines a nameless settlement forgotten by the outside world, its inhabitants bound to routine and vague labour, tending an endless fire beneath the city. When shadowy visitors emerge from the surrounding ice fog and press against the city’s glass palisades, the possibility of contact is ultimately rejected, and isolation is reaffirmed.

Musically, the album was composed by Duguay as an exploratory weave of experimental metal, folk, and orchestral brass, initially guided by the unstable overtones of an out-of-tune piano struggling against the deep January cold. Drawing influence from 20th-century totalism, collision music, and avant-metal lineages, the arrangements mirror Kom’s elliptical lyricism, conveying monotony, anxiety, and fleeting glimpses of life beyond the walls. Low brass features prominently throughout, its broad timbres evoking fog horns and distant signals across extreme weather.

The album was produced a year later in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Kom and Duguay reconvened with a group of local collaborators. Recorded over five days in a decommissioned church and mixed by Canadian noise musician and scholar Ky Brooks, Closed City brings together guitars, synths, piano, field recordings, voice, and a six-piece low-brass ensemble into a cohesive and immersive sound world.

Speaking on the project, Duguay and Kom reflect:

“As a metaphor for intentional isolation and its unintended consequences, the closed city was on our minds while we wrote the music and lyrics in the frozen January of northern Karelia.

The snow and ice seemed to go on forever, and the sun reflected the endless white and blinded us to the possibility that there could be anything outside of this strange and beautiful environment.

Recording in St. John’s, a heavy fog descended on us and we found ourselves in another kind of closed city altogether. Most music exists somewhere between isolation and interaction; as much as we hope to tell a particular story about seclusion and remoteness with this record, we do so in the spirit of human connection.”

Closed City is out 27th March via

Watch That Ends The Night.