Quinton Barnes - Black Noise
Watch That Ends The Night Records
Released on
Quinton Barnes is one of those artists I always watch out for ever since I first reviewed As a Motherfucker in 2021. We were graced with prolific releases from him such as the heavily industrial and electronic For the Love of Drugs (2022), the strong RnB and gospel leaning in Have Mercy on Me (2024), and the most recent release of CODE NOIR (2025) which featured the most tight of balances between all these musical elements that Barnes puts into his music.
Now we are given a bit of a different take on Quinton Barnes’ creativity with the release of Black Noise only a few months after CODE NOIR was released. Both conceptually and in execution, this new album is a thoughtful interrogation into noise, improv, and experimental sound composition which started out of a casual 2022 tweet that he tossed into the aether: “‘I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity … not sure how yet but the idea is there’.” It is here that the key producer and collaborator for this release came into the mix. Michael Cloud Duguay saw so much room for possibility in these meandering pondering and guided them towards a realization of the musician’s vision. Along the way, this gave way to all the collaborators that went into the production of this record including the anti-colonial free jazz quarter Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, experimental reedist and instrument maker Naomi McCarroll-Butler, pianist Edward Enman, and audio engineer Ky Brooks.
Under the shadow of the reactive jerking of the United States back into fascism with Donald Trump’s presidential re-election, the musical ensemble gathered November of 2024 to produce this record at Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal. This predicament alone makes this album such a distinct addition into Quinton Barnes’ catalogue, one that leans into philosophy, critical theory, and experimental music heavily — something which definitely caught my attention about Quinton when I saw he was reading Dialectic of Pop by Agnès Gayraud a few years back. Now Noise: The Political Economy of Music by French Marxist economist Jacques Attali informs the acute awareness of the intimate tie between music as a cultural form and the mode of socio-economic production to which it belongs, at times anticipating the revolutions at limits of that given mode. But Afropessimism is at the conceptual center, often associated with the thought Frank B. Wilderson III who makes the case that Blackness is not just a purely sociocultural racialization of individual people but rather a deeply ontological enforcement of death and enslavement, one is a slave and dead before ever being considered a living person. This intellectual leaning falls at odds with the naiveties of social analysis in “conscious hip-hop.”
Themes of black nihilism, overlooked black genius, precarity and poverty, grief, and triumph paint the picture of what Black Noise is about with tracks like the starkness of the radical disillusionment driving the titular track, the tribute to the much-neglected new music composer Julius Eastman in “What Would Eastman Do?,” the references to the reconstruction of the myth of Orpheus in Marcel Camus’ Orfeu negro (1959) in “Black Orpheus,” or the absolutely sublimity of “Movement 7” that brings about one of Quinton’s best tracks ever by carrying the emotional and raw gravitas of his words elevated by the slow crescendos introduced by the choir of vocals and other instrumental elements saturating the sonic space of the track.
Quinton Barnes continues to be one of the most innovative musicians in Canada. Black Noise only highlights this all the more for all the success in the experiments that it dares to do. Instrumentally and in production, the album is unlike anything Quinton has previously released. Conceptually and lyrically, the album is one of his most cutting incisions into the heart of social and ontological restlessness that is Black Noise. In the technical terminology of this album, “Black Noise” stands for the aspirations for Black freedom reduced to noise, which is equated with Black joy. It is a subtle conceptual move that happens here. Where pure Afropessismism reduces optimisms to senseless noise, Barnes musicalizes this noise through Attali’s theory into an anticipatory site for Black liberation that overcomes the bonds of its own time. Hopefully this persuades you to pay attention to both Quinton Barnes’ music and the realities that it faces.
