Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay have unveiled Old Fire, the latest track from their forthcoming collaborative album Closed City, due for release on 27th March.
Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay
Clocking in at nearly eight minutes, Old Fire stands as one of the album’s most ambitious and structurally dynamic pieces. Positioned early in the record, the track introduces the imagined industrial core at the heart of Closed City—a mysterious, ever-burning furnace maintained by inhabitants who have long since forgotten its original purpose.
Musically, the piece moves through stark contrasts, opening with restrained, tonal passages before erupting into bursts of distorted guitars and blastbeat-driven percussion. These moments of intensity are offset by wintry ambient textures and punctuated by improvised brass, creating a sense of descent into something vast and unknowable beneath the surface.
The track continues to build the conceptual world of Closed City, a record shaped by themes of isolation, routine and the uneasy boundary between protection and self-imposed exile. The album was first conceived during a two-week residency in Finland’s North Karelia region, where the pair worked in seclusion amid frozen landscapes and the remnants of a historic military defence line.
Drawing inspiration from Soviet-era “closed cities” — isolated settlements removed from maps and defined by secrecy — Kom and Duguay developed a narrative centred on a forgotten community bound to repetitive labour and cut off from the outside world. Across the album, fleeting suggestions of external contact emerge, only to be resisted in favour of continued isolation.
Sonically, Closed City blends experimental metal, folk traditions and orchestral brass into an immersive and often disorienting soundscape. Contributions from collaborators, including kantele player Mammu Koskelo, further root the project in its geographical and cultural setting, while recording sessions in a decommissioned church in Newfoundland add to the record’s atmospheric depth.
With Old Fire, Kom and Duguay offer a striking glimpse into a project that balances conceptual ambition with sonic exploration—an album that navigates extremes of tension, texture and emotion while reflecting on the nature of isolation and connection.
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