Quinton Barnes announces "BLACK NOISE" out June 6th + shares lead single "Movement 7"
Quinton Barnes announces details of album BLACK NOISE
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New single "Movement 7"
Out June 6th via Watch That Ends The Night
Available to pre-order now
Previous praise for Quinton Barnes
"This is an artist poised at the precipice of any number and combination of these possible aesthetic directions. There is nothing he has attempted to date that he cannot do." - The Quietus
"His shapeshifting voice and innovative production create a space to belong for those who’ve never fit in.” - Bandcamp Daily
Today, Montreal-based artist Quinton Barnes his album, BLACK NOISE, set for release on June 6th via Watch That Ends The Night. Alongside the announcement, Barnes shares the album’s first single, "Movement 7", a striking introduction to his most sonically ambitious and conceptually expansive work to date.
Listen to "Movement 7" HERE
Set to be the third album of his 27th year, and slated to be released on his 28th Birthday BLACK NOISE follows January 2025’s CODE NOIR and August 2024’s HAVE MERCY ON ME, each album exploring different facets of experimental music. Where CODE NOIR celebrated his Black and queer identity through a collision of club music, hyperpop, and R&B, and HAVE MERCY ON ME ventured into raw, confessional songwriting, BLACK NOISE expands into new dimensions of sonic exploration, interrogating the role of Black sound in an inherently anti-Black world.
Recorded at Montreal’s legendary Hotel2Tango studios, BLACK NOISE marks a stark departure from Barnes’ previous DIY production approach, embracing a highly collaborative process. Produced by esteemed Ontario producer Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions, formerly The Burning Hell), the album builds its intricate, chaotic arrangements from a foundation of Eurocentric classical piano compositions by pianist Edward Enman, which Barnes and his ensemble then deconstructed and reassembled into something wholly new.
The album features a cast of some of Montreal’s most daring experimental musicians, including members of Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, avant-garde reedist Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and noise producer Ky Brooks. Together, they explore an expansive sound that merges noise, hip-hop, breakbeat, avant-jazz, drone, and footwork, supporting Barnes’ poetic, nihilistic sprechgesang.
"Movement 7" is perhaps the album’s most emotionally resonant moment - a fusion of rapping and singing over an untouched, fully intact classical piano piece by Edward Enman. Initially resistant to writing a ballad, Barnes ultimately embraced the challenge, pushing his vocal delivery into uncharted territory. The track builds through layers of live ensemble performance, recorded over multiple takes to capture the perfect, natural arc of tension and release.
Speaking on the single Barnes said: “MOVEMENT 7 is as political as it is personal for me - I wrote it while in the depths of precarity, attempting to encapsulate all the tension, frustration, heartbreak and uncertainty that felt so potent at the time, and in many ways still does. I wanted to push against the conventional neoclassical piano piece with a more modern and disruptive hip-hop vocal style. Despite my initial resistance to writing a ballad, out of it came what feels like one of my most heartfelt works, something that cuts through all the pretence and lays it all bare".
Lyrically, BLACK NOISE examines overlooked Black genius, the precarity of poverty, grief, and the tension between destruction and creation. Written in the wake of Trump’s re-election, the album engages with themes of Afro-pessimism and resistance, while pushing boundaries of sound and storytelling.
Pre-order BLACK NOISE HERE
Listen to "Movement 7" HERE
With BLACK NOISE, Quinton Barnes cements himself as one of the most forward-thinking voices in experimental hip-hop and contemporary Black music. More than just an album, it is an assertion of sound as a radical form of resistance.
More on BLACK NOISE
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.
In late 2022, on the heels of the release of his For the Love of Drugs album, Quinton Barnes casually tweeted ‘I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity … not sure how yet but the idea is there’. The tweet was spotted by an acquaintance of Barnes, Ontario-based composer/producer Michael Cloud Duguay, who immediately saw vast creative potential in the idea. Widely acclaimed for his panoramic and idiosyncratic approach to developing highly stylised albums with live ensembles, Duguay reached out to Barnes and offered to collaborate on this project, applying his existing methods of curation, collaboration, and creative distillation to the artist’s vision, and the two began developing the concept for BLACK NOISE.
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. Sessions were booked at the legendary Hotel2Tango studio, a nexus of creative expression in Montreal that has housed sessions for notable releases by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Arcade Fire, Big Brave, and more. The creative process began with Barnes and Duguay commissioning and recording a suite of original classical piano music composed by Montreal based pianist Edward Enman. This material was then sampled, manipulated, and deconstructed to build foundations for lyric-writing and improvised ensemble performance in-studio. This process intentionally contrasted the institutions and imperialist practices of western music with the traditions of Black musical expression by taking a standard western tradition and exploiting its resources for destruction and reclamation.
With funding from The Canada Council for the Arts, the ensemble assembled in Montreal in November, 2024, just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in America. With the spectre of explicit fascism casting a tense shadow over the sessions, the collective came together every day for a week, using the manipulated piano suite recordings as a guide to improvisation and spontaneous composition. Collaboratively exploring different iterations of ‘noise’ through the lens of Barnes’ Black Noise theories and Duguay’s tightly conceptualized creative process, Black Noise coalesced piece by piece. The album’s material ranges from deconstructed acid funk (Black Noise) to an avant-garde post-rock cum footwork tribute to the late new music composer Julius Eastman (What Would Eastman Do?), harsh noise (Art of Survival), frenetic breakbeat (Sober for the Weekend), orchestral drone (Quiet Noise), to Barnes’ most heartbreakingly beautiful ballad work yet on the album closer, Movement 7. Foregrounded throughout is Barnes’ patently potent lyricism and dynamic vocal performance, exploring themes including black nihilism, overlooked black genius, precarity and poverty, grief, and triumph. With a world-class ensemble of instrumentalists supporting him, and Duguay’s refined penchant for sonic worldbuilding, Quinton Barnes has accomplished something unprecedented in both conceptual scope and delivery. 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.
Black Noise will be released on June 6, 2025, on Watch That Ends The Night Records, and the ensemble will be performing at a series of showcases at summer music festivals across Canada.
