The most prolific artists always seem to be those never locked into one sound. Perhaps they get bored quickly, perhaps they’re overrunning with creative ideas that no single EP or album release can possibly define them for longer than a week. It’s likely a mixture of both, and Quinton Barnes feels to be carving his own path within experimental hip-hop and R&B with breakneck pace.
Barnes is nothing short of ambitious, turning his hand to not just mimicking inspirations but taking them, remorphing them like plasticine and delivering warped versions of familiar styles. Last release CODE NOIR was far more in a fun, dancey vein; Barnes noted his love for Minnie Riperton and Prince then, and channelled early queer rave scenes and retrofitted Y2K electronics to transmit that feeling of celebratory freedom. It marked just the first of two 2025 records, neatly followed by Black Noise: once again fashioning core elements of pop, soul, jazz or rap records, but this time presenting them as if they’ve been delivered from a gulf in space. To do so, Barnes teamed up with Michael Cloud Duguay to deconstruct commissioned piano sketches through improvisational musicians, a want the artist has held since 2022, saying “I want to work with noise/improv musicians in some capacity… not sure how yet but the idea is there”.
The free-jazz quilt-making approach is only the start for how against-the-grain Black Noise is, but the record still carries well its intention to portray Black music and culture through a noise-related context. Its recording in a studio that’s housed other Canadian greats Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Big Brave certainly sees their avant-garde tendencies feeding through, masking and making gloomier such overwhelming bass work as Barnes previously displayed on Not Too Much, and its “just like I imagined…” lyrical theme pervades from the opener’s disparate soundscape through to quasi-interlude Art of Survival. The former sees drums and distorted brass filling the space before locking into a bass-and-guitar groove, a funk emerging from the nothingness, to see Barnes naturally breaking into a connected flow. The latter’s throbbing sinkhole sound is not far from The Body’s I Shall Die Here, a collaboration that sounds highly inviting, and evokes the project’s overarching mood.
As such, formulaic sounds are the last thing on Barnes’ mind. While What Would Eastman Do?’s bass and pan flutes do build repetitively, it doesn’t last long to let a ringing saxophone cut through, reminiscent of the work of Viagra Boys’ Oscar Karls or Maruja’s Joe Carroll. Pulling from post-punk while attributing the work of famed minimalist composer and performance artist Julius Eastman is all in Barnes’ wheelhouse, who even self-references his heroes on centrepiece Black Orpheus—“Might go abstract on this shit / think I might be Moor Mother.”—and makes the “sounds of distress from the underworld” and “tales of distress from another world” applicable to today’s hellscape, with all of us praying “we don’t regress this time” amid a nine-minute horrorcore free-jazz frenzy.
It can be difficult to swallow (as with a lot of other moments here) but Barnes’ juggling of the playful with the dead-serious is made evident through his elastic voice, peppering even the darkest moments. Sober For The Weekend lets the jarring sax run free once again, only after it skips through driving breakbeats and a scattergun flow Barnes has chameleonically displayed throughout his thick and fast career so far. Quiet Noise and Movement 7 evoke their names: an open letter full of ambience and calming strings, and a denouement piano ballad respectively. Even with the connected lyrical dots and instrumental motifs, Black Noise is never in one lane, which works to its advantage.
This is a challenging record, and certainly a more claustrophobic, thought-provoking follow-up to CODE NOIR’s more accessible aesthetic. However, with this release one of many that Barnes is turfing out—without compromising his carefully detailed vision once—it marks another step in a whole body of work that’s going in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Barnes is unafraid to tread the road less travelled; by succeeding in most of these try-out exercises, his should be an oeuvre well worth following, shooing away cookie-cutter expectations and driving the need for more passionate and engaging works in the process.
For fans of: billy woods, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, clipping.
‘Black Noise’ by Quinton Barnes is released on 6th June.
Words by Elliot Burr
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