In November 2022, the Montreal-based rapper-singer-songwriter Quinton Barnes tweeted “I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity”. Barnes was looking to explore the Frenchman’s thesis that, by providing a channel for noise, music can challenge the normative order and change the course of social development.
Composer-producer Michael Cloud Duguay offered to collaborate and they commissioned pianist Edward Enman to write a suite which was then sampled, altered, and taken apart. With the group of Montreal noise performers and free improvisers assembled by Duguay, Barnes destroyed and reclaimed standard western tradition. The outcome is Black Noise, his sixth album and by far his most audacious.
To be fair, the 28-year-old Kitchener-born artist has never played it safe. Ever since his 2020 debut, Aarupa, he’s been pushing back against restrictive tastes, taking a different direction with each release. He fuses moods and genres on every album. 2024’s HAVE MERCY ON ME sounds both raw and sensual, with a Gospel choir featuring prominently, and CODE NOIR, his first album of 2025, is an upbeat, rave-infused affair, yet with room for reflection.
On Black Noise, Barnes outdoes himself. Rather
than simply going beyond musical boundaries, he shatters them, and as
long as his efforts help tear down the cramped constraints he doesn’t
care if the shards will cut him up. Heck, he’s ready for the ultimate
sacrifice. “I’m something like a menace / Self-destruct before I let ‘em
get the best of me”, he raps on the dense nine-minute odyssey “Black
Orpheus”.
The despair that permeates the album is fed by
Afropessimism, a theory formulated by the critic Frank B. Wilderson III,
who posits that even though society couldn’t exist without Blackness,
it constantly negates it. Emancipation is only possible by negating this
negation, i.e. demolishing the old system. Barnes takes it upon himself
to fight the power and goes to battle. Black Noise is a 33-minute depiction of the tumultuous, brutal combat.
Barnes’ preoccupation with Black identity is by no means recent. “Switch” from 2021’s As a Motherfucker
saw him rant “N*****s, they hitting my triggers / They ain’t thinking
bigger / I need some new n*****s”, and he explored the subject
extensively on 2022’s For the Love of Drugs and CODE NOIR. His bleak outlook on life isn’t new either – on “Dead”, off For the Love of Drugs,
he wondered if he should kill himself – but his previous albums also
had bright, playful moments, and even the occasional touch of humour.
The
closest Barnes comes to lightheartedness here is the half-joking
statement “Bitch, I’m special”, but not only is it followed by “But
somehow I don’t think I’ll make it this time”, it comes in the middle of
a song (“Sober for the Weekend”) whose first half is a saxophone-driven
cacophony of squawks and shrieks while the second, introduced by a
wailing clarinet, finds a pensive Barnes – “I think… / I think I’m… / I
think… / I think I’m…”, he stammers – sinking into a brooding ambient
drone.
Most of Black Noise sounds like the frantic
session of a free jazz band that prefers chaos to patterns or rhythm.
Even the more subdued offerings fail to provide respite; you never know
when the next aural attack is coming. When it does, it’s deafening and
downright terrifying. Parts of the title cut could soundtrack a
psycho-horror film, while some of “Art of Survival” wouldn’t be out of
place in “Gotta Light?”, the surreal episode of the Twin Peaks reboot. You’re never safe, but neither is Barnes.
On “Black Noise”, he calls himself a dumb fool for thinking
Black people will ever be free, then turns to the late American
post-minimalist composer Julius Eastman for guidance on the part smooth,
part noisy, part dancy “What Would Eastman Do?” By the time the third
track, “Art of Survival”, comes around, he can only expect help from
above (“Pray for me / It’s never letting go”).
He then goes through hell in the crushing “Black Orpheus”,
teeters between confidence and uncertainty on “Sober for the Weekend”
and “Quiet Noise” before finding some beauty during the vulnerable,
soulful closer “Movement 7”. No longer able to think straight – “I'm so
free, I know me / I'm lonely, I'm not me” – he somehow manages to get
rid of “the old me” while Enman’s piece plays like a Chopin nocturne,
hassled by eerie strains of guitar and violin.
Though bruised, Barnes is still standing as the final sound
– half sine wave, half theremin – fades away. The battle goes on but
he’s scored a victory. Black Noise dissolves existing genres and gives you a taste of what may lie beyond the system he’s fighting against.
