Canadian producer and composer Michael Cloud Duguay and songwriter Mathias Kom have unveiled details of a striking new collaborative project, Closed City, set for release on 27th March. Alongside the announcement, the duo have shared the project’s debut single, Ice Fog – No Exit, offering a first immersive glimpse into the album’s stark and carefully constructed world.
Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom
Closed City reunites two artists whose creative paths first intertwined during a prolific period of collaboration in the 2000s before diverging for more than a decade. Reconnecting in 2021, Duguay (Scions, Quinton Barnes’ Black Noise) and Kom (The Burning Hell) began developing a project shaped by shared interests in avant-metal, drone, musique concrète, folk traditions and orchestral composition. The result is a tightly focused conceptual album that explores isolation, world-building and the uneasy tension between withdrawal and connection.
Positioned at the heart of the record, Ice Fog – No Exit is a seven-and-a-half-minute centrepiece driven by balladic piano and slow-burning momentum. Muted, repeating chords form a steady pulse as the track gradually expands into dense, layered passages of guitars, drums, brass and synths, before receding again to reveal space and clarity. Throughout, the piano acts as an anchor, guiding the piece towards a final movement that feels broader, brighter and quietly hopeful within an album otherwise defined by enclosure.
Speaking about the track, Duguay describes it as a culmination of both artists’ approaches, drawing on heightened melodrama and compositional ambition, while Kom’s vocal melodies and shifting lyrical perspectives deepen its emotional weight. Kom adds that the lyrics unfold in three movements, charting the arrival of mysterious outsiders, the denial of their existence, and the eventual blurring of boundaries between observer and observed.
The conceptual foundations of Closed City were laid during a two-week artist residency in January 2024 on a remote archipelago in Finland’s North Karelia region. Living and working in a centuries-old log house amid extreme winter conditions, the pair developed the album’s narrative and sonic framework, joined at times by Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo, whose contributions further rooted the project in regional folk traditions.
Kom’s background in ethnomusicology led him to research Soviet-era “closed cities” — secretive, isolated settlements erased from maps and cut off from the outside world. From this history, Closed City imagines a nameless settlement tending an endless fire, its inhabitants locked into routine as shadowy figures emerge from the surrounding ice fog, only to be collectively denied.
Musically, the album blends experimental metal, folk forms and orchestral brass, with low brass textures evoking fog horns and distant warning signals. Recorded a year later in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the album came together over five days in a decommissioned church, bringing together guitars, piano, synths, field recordings, voices and a six-piece low-brass ensemble. The record was mixed by Ky Brooks and mastered by Matt Azevedo, resulting in a cohesive and immersive sound world.
As Duguay and Kom reflect, Closed City is both a meditation on isolation and a gesture toward connection — shaped by frozen landscapes, heavy fog, and the shared act of making music together.
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