An organ nobody had tuned in 150 years

Composer Michael Cloud Duguay, multi-instrumentalist Andrew MacKelvie, engineer Jake Nicoll and field recordist Dave Grenon got into a vehicle they call the Scamper and drove thirty hours from Peterborough, Ontario to Newfoundland — an Atlantic island roughly the size of England. The plan was plain: seven churches in seven parts of the island, seven organs. “At its core, the impetus was to go on an adventure,” Duguay says.

They chose organs because it is the one instrument you cannot separate from its room. “They've only ever existed in that space and only ever been heard in that space,” Duguay explains. The Scamper is Nicoll's solar-powered mobile studio, fitted with hand-built telescopic mic stands that reach thirty-five feet. “You pull up to a church; you kick open the door of your camper RV and start running 200ft cables inside.”

The plan came apart before they left. The Royal Canadian College of Organists pointed them to a 2012 book listing every organ in the province. Phone calls revealed that many of the churches had closed, and that some of the surviving organs no longer worked. The churches themselves were built in the early nineteenth century by fishermen who did not know how to build churches — Duguay calls them upside-down ships. From that point the project became an archive.

The music is played with dice. MacKelvie devised an aleatoric system in which a roll decides key, interval, stop settings and duration. On the ninth track, “Damnable Island”, every organ they met on the trip arrives at once: one humming note joined by eight more, each at a different stage of being out of tune. Through that wavering mass a priest talks about his dwindling congregation — if we get smaller, he says, we may get stronger.

“Greenspond Tickle” features an organ untuned for a hundred and fifty years. The opening track, “Pond 1”, is an instrument dug out of rubble and switched on for the first time in three decades; you can hear it clearing its throat. The churches answered the request almost identically: I have no idea what you are talking about, please come and do it.

“Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go” is out on Watch That Ends The Night, MacKelvie and Duguay's own label. Alongside the organs there is saxophone, flute and field recording: talk, footsteps, weather. It is not an album of organ music. It is a record about what a room remembers once nobody comes to fill it — and about an instrument that cannot be carried out through the door, and so shares the fate of the building, which shares the fate of the village.