Quinton Barnes and the Black Noise Ensemble

Quinton Barnes is a relentlessly ambitious Montreal-based artist exploring the edges of Canada's music scene. Since 2018, he's built a unique sound, writing, rapping, singing, producing, mixing, and mastering his own work across a prolific discography. For his new album, Black Noise, produced by Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions), releasing June 6 on Watch That Ends The Night Records, Barnes took an assuredly different approach than with his past work, resulting in a release that, while in staunch keeping with his radically innovate methods of expression, presents a bold sonic evolution and showcases the talents and efforts of a diverse collective of Montreal-based artists and musicians in collaboration.

Inspired by Afropessimist thought and the work of French Economist Jacques Attali, Barnes became interested in noise and the function that it can serve, particularly within the context of Black music, and hoped to situate noise within a context of black cultural expression, fusing soul and gospel-inspired vocals with noise, rapping with noise, and pushing the limits of black genres to an aesthetic and sonic brink. Taking notes, Duguay curated an ensemble out of experienced noise performers and free improvisers living and working in Montreal including members of anti-colonial free jazz quarter Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, experimental reedist and instrument maker Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and audio engineer Ky Brooks. Black Noise stands alone not only in its enigmatic approach to genre fusion and collaboration but as a recorded document that undeniably situates noise, creatively and intellectually, within a context of Black cultural expression outside of the trappings of so-called ‘conscious hip-hop’. Black Noise represents something undeniably new not only in Barnes’ rapidly developing oeuvre, but in the canons of hip-hop and experimental music.