In November 2022, Montreal vocalist and producer Quinton Barnes took to the platform then known as Twitter to shoot an intention into the ether: “I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity… not sure how yet but the idea is there.”

The tweet was answered by Ontario based producer Michael Cloud Duguay, but it took a little while before their collaboration came to fruition. In the meantime, Barnes produced two more albums: the gospel-infused HAVE MERCY ON ME and the sumptuously queer Code Noir, self-released in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

The concept for Black Noise, as the new album with Duguay would eventually be titled, actually began to take shape around 2021, when Barnes was reading Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy Of Music alongside Frank B Wilderson III’s Afropessimism. He was struck by the parallels between Attali’s conception of noise as music’s “other” and Wilderson’s analysis of Blackness as that which is integral to yet excluded from human experience.

For Barnes, the concept of Black noise exists in this “ontological relationship to being” – the otherness which must be alienated or exiled in order for white, hierarchical culture to define itself. “The way I was conceiving of it wasn’t necessarily as noise itself, the way people think of noise music, but more so, what the function of Black sound is within the world,” he explains. “So it’s not necessarily, I’m just going to rap over noise music, but how can we, like, destabilise a song within itself?”

Here, Barnes curates an exclusive Wire mix that further expands on his concept of Black noise.

Tracklist

Aby Ngana Diop “Dieuleul Dieuleul”
The Last Poets “Wake Up, Niggers”
Netsanet Mellesse “Mnew Jal”
Miles Davis “Rated X”
Matana Roberts “Predestined Confessions”
Alice Coltrane “Universal Consciousness”
Jlin “Sodalite”
RP Boo “Heavy Heat”
DJ Rashad “Every Day Of My Life”
Quinton Barnes “Jealousy”
Ghedalia Tazartes “Un amour si grand qu'il nie son objet”
Scions “The Mountain”
Quinton Barnes “Sober For The Weekend”
Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble “Nothing 5-7”
Sonny Sharrock “Black Woman”

In The Wire 496, Barnes talks in detail to Emily Pothast about the philosophy behind his Black Noise album. That issue of the magazine is sold out in our online shop. But you may still find copies on sale at one of our regular stockists. Subscribers can read the article in our online library.