Quinton Barnes releases "Black Noise" via Watch That Ends The Night
Praise for "BLACK NOISE" and Quinton Barnes
“Quinton Barnes is a vital and rising force” - The Wire
"Montreal talent Quinton Barnes is quietly making some of the most striking and progressive music you’ll hear." - Wonderland
“An artist whose words possess the weight of a more philosophical mind.” - The Quietus
"A really powerful record that made me stop in my tracks" - Tina Edwards, Soho Radio
"Some artists can only be categorized by how they defy limitations, like Quinton Barnes" - Bandcamp Daily
“This is one of the most exciting releases of the year” - Hi-Fi+
“For Barnes, his ruminations on religion, racism, artistry, sexuality and the nature of existence demand the grandest spectacle imaginable.” - The Skinny
Today, on his 28th birthday, Quinton Barnes shares Black Noise via Watch That Ends The Night Records - a sprawling, radical sonic document that marks a sharp new chapter in the Montreal-based artist’s rapidly evolving body of work.
Black Noise is the final entry in a trilogy of albums Barnes created during his 27th year, following January’s frenetic club opus CODE NOIR and August 2024’s eccentric, electronic HAVE MERCY ON ME. Where CODE NOIR was a euphoric celebration of Barnes’ Black and queer identity - a collision of hyperpop, R&B, and EDM - Black Noise is an orchestral hip-hop epic rooted in Afro-pessimism, improvisation, and destruction-as-reclamation.
At the heart of the project is a transformative collaboration with Ontario-based producer and composer Michael Cloud Duguay, who helped bring Barnes’ vision to life through a process that emphasised live improvisation, ensemble performance, and conceptual rigour. The two began developing the idea after Duguay responded to a tweet from Barnes in late 2022, in which he expressed a desire to work with noise and improvisational musicians. Duguay, known for his panoramic, ensemble-driven production style, curated a group of Montreal’s most boundary-pushing performers, including members of the anti-colonial jazz collective Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, reedist and instrument maker Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and engineer Ky Brooks.
Recorded at Montreal’s legendary Hotel2Tango studios just days after Donald Trump’s re-election, the sessions unfolded under a shadow of rising authoritarianism - a mood that permeates the album’s turbulent, often apocalyptic sonic palette. The process began with the commissioning of a suite of Eurocentric classical piano works by Montreal pianist Edward Enman, which were then sampled, deconstructed, and reassembled into new frameworks for improvisation. This creative act - tearing apart the tools of Western musical tradition to build something entirely new - became central to Black Noise's conceptual foundation.
The result is a dizzying, genre-elusive album that fuses Barnes’ soulful vocals with harsh noise, breakbeats, drone, and free jazz. His sprechgesang-style delivery cuts through arrangements laced with mbira, saxophone, violin, handmade flutes, organ, and the custom-crafted “drone-jo.” Barnes tackles themes of Black nihilism, grief, survival, and the avant-garde potential of Blackness, not as “conscious hip-hop”, but as a full-spectrum sonic philosophy. Standout tracks include the post-rock/footwork tribute "What Would Eastman Do?", the searing "Art of Survival", the heartbreaking ballad "Movement 7", and title track "Black Noise", which channels deconstructed acid funk into something beautifully disorienting.
Black Noise isn’t just Barnes’ most ambitious album - it’s a rare feat of artistic risk-taking, where collaboration, conceptual weight, and raw sonic experimentation converge. With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the contributions of a deeply engaged ensemble, Barnes and Duguay have created something that challenges the limits of genre, authorship, and musical tradition itself.
Quinton Barnes has steadily carved a singular path in Canada’s experimental music underground, sharing stages with Billy Woods, Backxwash, and Armand Hammer, and receiving acclaim from The Wire, The Quietus, Bandcamp Daily, among many others. Barnes continues to push the boundaries of what Black experimental music can sound like - and mean.
