Michael Cloud Duguay and Jake Nicoll on Innovating Sustainable Music Practice - INTERVIEW
Michael Cloud Duguay and Jake Nicoll discuss how a mobile recording studio impacted the message of To Cry Out In The Wilderness (Scions)
We’re back for 2025, and we’re bringing you some insightful interviews and reviews conducted at the end of last year. As with most international ventures, Michael Cloud Duguay and Jake Nicoll joined us over Zoom to chat about the Scamper, a mobile recording studio in a caravan, that has gone on to be an example of sustainability in an industry that relies so heavily on energy consumption. Hot off the release of Scions’ album To Cry Out In The Wilderness, which has strong environmentalist themes, this refreshing chat about practice, process and purpose speaks to the relationship between music and technology, and how a conscientious approach to music production is an increasingly prevalent topic of intrigue.
ADV. First I want to say, congratulations on your album that's come out. That's an incredible feat. How are you feeling?
MCD. It's been good. It's been well received, and it was a product of a lot of different people's contributions, and I think we're all pretty happy with how it turned out. And it's nice that it's out there now resonating with people elsewhere.
ADV. I got the sense that there's an environmentalist theme coming through, particularly in relation to this almost post apocalyptic mushroom cloud at the end of the world. I was really getting that sense coming through that there is this kind of regeneration of sorts. Do you want to speak to that?
MCD. There was no conversation prior to beginning this project where we addressed wanting to make a record with these themes specifically, let alone sort of explicitly. We based our conceptual framework on one that was already existing by one of the three primary constituent parts of the ensemble. We were three different groups that came together to make this record. And one of those projects, New Hermitage, who are based in Halifax, already had sort of a pre existing narrative that they worked around. They play improvisational music, lyricless. It's different every time, no composed material, and they sort of attached a narrative to it, because, in part, they thought it was funny that, because it's instrumental improvisational music, they could just be like, this is what it's about — and people would start hearing that in what they were doing and drawing that theme out of it. So interestingly, we've had sort of a similar experience with that — lyrically, and in terms of the production approach that we took using solar power — it really rises to the surface listening to the record, but it was certainly not our intention at first. It actually was born out of something organic that we're actually all experiencing individually and collectively. It just sort of came up as a thing that we were all prepared to write about and to use as a sort of map while we were writing the material.
MCD. When we went into the composition sessions in March of 2023, we had a little bit of this narrative, so we based it on this existing narrative brought to the table by New Hermitage. And there's this quite simple idea — the story is just that post apocalyptic roving band of musicians who are performing music. And you know, in this post apocalyptic world, part of what happened when we wanted to compose it was that I had sort of inflated their narrative without knowing I had, and I thought that their idea was that they were a group of musicians who discovered instruments, but with no context whatsoever. They had never heard recorded music. They had never heard an instrument performed before. So they find these instruments, and they're just playing it however, which is in keeping with sort of their approach to their performance, which involves a lot of extended technique, and unorthodox and unusual approaches to their instrumental performance and their collective improvisation as well.
MCD. So we actually started from a bit of a misunderstanding in terms of this speculative fiction model that we were working with as a guiding narrative tool. But we all liked it. Once we understood the misunderstanding, we all liked it and ran with it. So we had this very base idea. And with New Hermitage being an instrumental group, my concept with this record from the very beginning was to pair them with Joyful Joyful, who are, for all intents and purposes, a totally vocal group, and to bring together these two ensembles who are doing very different things, on one hand, but have a similar approach to drone performance and the way that they think about and make music.
MCD. The idea in this narrative was that they were this roving band of musicians who have discovered instruments and don't know anything about them, are hearing a human voice singing for the first time, and that would be Cormac, our vocalist. That was the starting place. Jake, did you know about any of this?
JN. Nobody has ever told me this!
MCD. I could see you smiling. Jake wasn't there when we composed it. So that's where it started. And we wove in and out of different ideas, and some got left behind, some we didn't stick with. But I often approach making records that way, including instrumental records with a narrative concept, especially when we're dealing in improvisation or spontaneous composition, or very quick composing or arranging, to use it as a tool to keep things in my brain, categorised in sequence in a way that makes sense to me, and hopefully that I can communicate to others and have them buy in as well.
MCD. And as we were composing it, the lyrics became sort of more and more explicitly about this sort of experience, and this idea of transmissions from the past into the future, like dodging around the present that we exist in. That's why there's these sort of sonic themes that sound like they're being spoken over a megaphone, or like an old radio broadcast that's coming in and out. That's very much about this idea of the past communicating with the future. Or say, in this narrative, these characters, they discover a radio for the first time, they hear music that way for the first time. What would your relationship to making sounds be, without any context — that sort of excitement and the spirit of that was very present in what we were doing as well, and it allowed us to make decisions around how we were performing on our instruments, and then later making production choices.
MCD. But to go back to the original question - the nature of it is that, we as a group are a bunch of folks around the same age who are more or less in a place of stewardship right now — that it's nearly impossible to problem solve how to step up and make decisions that will contribute to the perpetuity of the planet's health and the human race. And we didn't come into this as hardcore activists. Some of us are, some of us aren't. But that all came up because it's very much the experience that we're all having and very much the environment that we're all working in right now. And then that got iterated through a bunch of different themes, some of it more leaning towards speculative fiction. I find some of it very real. Cormac our vocalist, they address very directly the idea of becoming a parent and in this present world — and that has to do with the climate crisis, it has to do with gender, it has to do with a number of different themes, but the environmental one is the one that people have latched onto. I was a little surprised, you know, I guess I never thought of it as such an explicit message. And now listening back, I'm like, well, it very clearly is. To finish my meandering, I think that it's good, because it's honest, it's just what actually came out of us when we sat down to create the body of work.
ADV. On first listen, there’s a darkness to the album, but it ends on a note of hope — that there’s something to look forward to. Do you want to speak to that?
JN. It is obviously a very dark situation that we are forced to face these days, in general. That was my personal motivation behind the whole solar powered recording thing — there’s got to be some way to at least relate the engineering recording thing to the whole crisis that I'm just listening to and thinking about constantly. I'm considering the new parent thing, or wanting to have a child. My partner just had a child five weeks ago. So I'm obviously very much attached to this world existing and going on in some way. And I think that is, in a strange way, like the music itself, things might change a lot, and there might be this sense of tragedy — there's no more snow anymore, and that's brutal, you know, or this used to be a lake — but in some form or fashion, the music hopefully will go on. That sounds cheesy, but there's still some beauty potentially in that mushroom at the end of humanity.
ADV. Turning to the fact that the medium is the message, I feel like in the recording process itself, that was an act of activism. Do you want to talk about that?
JN. As an act of activism — I mean, it is, in a way, yes, because it's a weird thing to do. It wasn't strictly necessary. It's sort of a funny concept to to put a bunch of batteries and solar panels on a Scamper and record an album in it — we're in a town where we could just plug into the wall and record. But it is interesting because it just introduces this whole other narrative to the process. And there are some interesting technical things that it actually did allow for that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Acoustically, it meant that we had this safe control room, where we could hear things exactly the way that the listener is going to hear, and not in the cacophonous echo chamber, which was the church that we were recording in. It’s nice clean power, you’re not having to worry about the weird old wiring of the church. It's a unique idea and a unique process. It's sort of funny and strange when you know that the sounds and that the whole process from analogue signal, from wave forms in the air to microphone to preamp to computer, only occurred through energy that came from the sun in this very small scale system, and in a way, it does embody, accidentally, the themes and concepts of this sort of rag tag, future apocalypse team of musicians making music out of whatever instruments they have just discovered. It fits into this vision of disparate, disconnected, small scale systems of recording things, making it work with what you have.
JN. It also was very interesting, in terms of tone and mood, because it's not like you just plug into the the Scamper and you have all the power you could ever want. There was this real sense of urgency, like there's only so much battery that that thing has. Once the sun goes down, there's maybe four hours — you could probably get to about 11:30 or midnight before it was, like, that's it, recording session’s over. In general, because we're all working together with the timing of this, it introduced a really interesting set of constraints and also, again, brought to life the reality of this narrative that the whole thing was steeped in — the sense of scarcity and limited resources. We take for granted the way that all these lights and everything that's happening is as it is, but you know, it's all very magical.
ADV. As a recording artist myself, I feel that taken-for-grantedness of the energy that we consume to create three minutes of a song, especially nowadays that we have digital technology, so you can keep re-recording vocals or instruments to get it to the point that you want it to get to, but you're not actually thinking about the environmental impacts or the impacts beyond just you standing in the booth.
JN. Which is interesting! It's like people who work with a lot of tape, there's this sense of scarcity that creates this performance, like, this is a moment. Now, you know, it's not just, let's just strive for this abstract, perfect thing. Eventually we'll get there with enough takes. It's like, no what's happening right now is an important thing.
ADV. I really like that. And I think it leans quite comfortably into your improvisational style, Michael. Do you want to speak more about that, and what guided that process of improvisation?
MCD. We had six days that eight of us were together on this island, not far from where I was living at the time. And in some cases, some of us were actually meeting for the first time. We had done one performance before, an improvised performance the first time we ever met, and interestingly, actually, it was at a festival where Jake played right before us. We played in an old theatre. So Jake has been a part of this thing from the from the get go, but we began improvisationally at a festival where I had been programmed. I wasn't sure what approach I was going to take to my performance. I had done one performance about a year prior in Halifax with New Hermitage, who performed with me as improvisers. I played arrangements of my songwriter stuff with them joining in, and then we'd improvise around that. And when I was programmed at this festival, I asked if they wanted to come join and do the same approach to that again. And then Joyful Joyful, who were really good friends of mine, it turned out they just happened to be on tour in that part of the country at the same time. So I asked if they wanted to join. I asked the festival programmer if I could have this big group — they'd asked me to play solo, and all of a sudden, I had nine people! Jake, you might remember that poster, our name took up an entire line. And yeah, we just we got together on stage, and we improvised, using my songs as a starting place for improvisation.
MCD. I've produced a number of records for myself under my own name, but hadn't produced a large scale record for a group that wasn't explicitly my thing. And as soon as we finished that performance, it just became really clear to me in that moment that this was something that ought to move forward into a specific form. So we began in improvisation, and it was improvisation that, in the first place, demonstrated the strength and the potential of this group of people working together. So then we got together with this new concept, which was that we wouldn't be performing my material, but we'd be composing material as a collective. We began every morning by just waking up early. There was a big rehearsal space. It was a piano room, like a piano lounge of a hotel, and that connected directly to where we were staying, so we could just walk down the stairs with our coffee and start playing. And we just began every day with more or less free improvisation. In some cases, I had guiding ideas. I would have a word or a theme or some sort of concept to begin the improvisation, and we would play for as long as we played, and at the end of it, we'd reflect on what we had done, and if there's anything we'd like that we could pull out of it to start developing further. We did that every single day. And so each of those pieces that you hear on the record began as an improvisation where, when we were done, we'd look back and pull things out of it. And then, of course, there is a lot of improvisation on the record as well, and there's a lot of droning arrangements where people are playing quite freely over the top of it as well.
ADV. And then, the last question, what's next for your group?
MCD. Well, this project is made up of, foundationally, these three constituent projects, but we have a giant web of hundreds of projects between everybody involved with this. So right now, for Scions, we're still continuing to push this album, and we're thinking about going overseas sometime in 2025. We'd love to come to New Zealand! Jake and I, our working relationship as producer/engineer didn't begin with this. We had made another record, almost exactly a year before in another province in Atlantic Canada called Prince Edward Island, where it was similar. We performed my material that I composed with just a group of people who lived in that region and recorded using the Scamper. This was the first time that I had ever worked with Jake and the Scamper and, Jake, it was the first time you ever recorded a full length album with it, right?
JN. Yeah, that was! I'd done some mixing and various other recording projects in it, but this was the first, self contained, we're doing in the Scamper kind of project.
MCD. We've known each other for a really long time. Jake and I played in the same band, but at different times. So that's how we know each other. And this record we were making out in Prince Edward Island was largely with people from that project, The Burning Hell. And so that record was recorded with the Scamper. We recorded in a bunch of different locations around that region, which included in the lantern room of a lighthouse. We recorded in an abandoned farmhouse on the shore of the ocean…
JN. Yeah, in field of lavender. No, what was it? Lupins.
MCD. You're probably picking up that something that Jake and I both possess is this desire to work on things a little bit differently than the conventional approach to making records. I think I'll speak for myself, but I know Jake shares this — I have a real love for logistical problem solving. And Jake, I think, as an engineer…
JN. Oh, yeah, definitely. Figuring out how to make a weird idea actually possible.
MCD. When Jake was referring to dealing with a shortage of resources as an experiment — we didn't have to use the Scamper, and there were other decisions that, led us to using the Scamper too. But also, Jake's just a great engineer, and we wanted to work with Jake. And Jake comes with the Scamper. Working in this environment of forced precarity, it's almost like we're role playing a little bit, you know. This is what it would be like to record in a post apocalyptic world where our only source of energy is the sun — that creates a really specific and unique and interesting vibe in the sessions that you're not going to get in a recording session that isn't under those extremely specific circumstances, not to mention that exact group of people at that exact moment in time working with this specific material, or in some cases no material, in improvising. I'm really interested in making records that capture something distinct and unique through a distinct and unique process, and I'm interested in how that process results in, what is the sonic evidence of that? Is it perceptible? But generally speaking, making records that are a document of a shared collective experience. That record’s coming out in spring of next year. Jake and I, as well as a number of members of Scions, made a related project in August in Newfoundland, where Jake lives.
JN. Basically, we went to seven different churches and around the island, to all sorts of small towns and places I've never even been after living in Newfoundland for 15 years. It's a huge island!
MCD. Yeah, it's five and a half times the size of Ireland.
JN. So we blasted around basically with the trailer, stopped at a church, team would run in, install our microphones, it was organ based records. We were using the various different organs that they would have at these churches. Some of them, traditional hand pump organs. Some of them more newer, tonal organs. Working with the space, partly capturing the impulse response and the reverbs of the space was sort of a side project, while also working on these various compositions, all again, significantly improvised in the process. And working with the instrument that we just happened to have there, there were a lot of unknowns in the process, and it was like really embracing the like, What are we going to discover? What's going to happen today? What's the church going to be like? What's it going to sound like? What's the instruments going to be like? How out of tune will it be compared to the other instruments?
MCD. I was reaching out to these churches in this very rural province with very, very remote places. We were specifically hitting some uniquely remote spaces. And without fail, every time I would call, I'd find it was nearly impossible to even get a phone number for some of these churches because they're in communities that are so remote and so small, they don't need a phone because you can just see the church from your house, and can just go talk to whomever you need to talk to at the church. I had to do quite a bit of research just to get phone numbers, and in most cases, when I called these churches and described what we were doing, on one hand, they were like, What are you talking about? But also, yes, you're incredibly welcome to come here and do this project.
MCD. We had no idea what kind of organ we were showing up to, and we had no way of predicting which organ will this part sound better on. We would just have to use the one that we that we arrived to, and one piece that we made at that time, for example, was as simple as we just played the same note on each organ and recorded them all over the top of one another. And these organs are, again, in these remote spaces where there's pretty extreme weather, and often in these old wooden churches — one we played had not been tuned in 150 years. When we add it all on top, we get this wild, micro tonal, if not sort of tonal spectrum. Even though we're playing the same note on the keyboard, they end up being different notes. So we were just exploring the surprises that we were met with at each place we went to. We had a photographer travel with us, and we're going to collect his photographs of the trip into a book and release that sometime in 2026. I've got tonnes of projects on the go. I know Jake has just started a very specific, very large project that has taken up a lot of time, I imagine!
JN. I’m still finding some time to record. But yeah, fatherhood, it's a project for sure!
Photo credit - Jamie Kronick.