Les Vespérales #20 – Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go (Michael Cloud Duguay) / Estelle Schorpp

In June, 2024, Canadian composer Michael Cloud Duguay and collaborators travelled over 1,500km across Newfoundland in a self-built, solar-powered mobile studio, recording seven historic church organs in seven remote communities, resulting in one of the most unique and imaginative albums ever produced in Canada.

At each stop, the ensemble encountered remarkably different organs with unusual histories.Some were acoustic, hand-cranked instruments while others relied on foot pedals to generate sound. Some were recently updated and featured digital keyboards and amplifiers. One had not been tuned in 120 years; another was buried beneath a pile of rubble in the upper gallery of a decommissioned Catholic church.

While the foundation for the project’s material began with compositions and improvisational experiments, the team’s collective interest in field recording, spontaneous composition, and responding to their environments shaped the work and enhanced its development. Duguay conducted a series of interviews with church wardens, reverends, congregants, and community members at each location. These interviews explored, from a secular perspective, the history of the churches and foregrounded the progressive vanishing of these instruments as churches are shuttered while congregations decrease.