In June 2025, I received an email stating that I have been accepted into the residency program at the Centre d’expérimentation musicale (CEM) in Chicoutimi. I was stunned by the news; I’d submitted my project thinking that I had little chance, having looked at past residents. But there I was, and they’d put their faith in me. Even after some thirty years (I officially started making music in 1995), I sometimes doubt the relevance of my work.

I discussed potential dates for the one-month residency (culminating in a concert documented on video) with Executive and Artistic Director, Guillaume Thibert, and his Assistant, Stéphane Beaulieu, and conferred with them about the instrumentation for the work-in-progress.

I had already worked with CEM musicians at Guillaume’s spontaneous invitation in 2019 (the 6 murs project), and I was keen to work again with the bassist (Stéphane Beaulieu, again!), drummer Réal Gagnon, and the guitarist we’ll call Michel Potiron. I wanted to add percussion alongside the drums to give the rhythm section depth; they recommended Émile Boucher Cloutier. I also needed synthesizers, an electronic element from someone other than me. To this end, Marie-Pierre Brasset agreed to join the project. Finally, the group needed an instrument more associated with jazz, such as a saxophone or another wind instrument; trumpeter Nicolas Gobeil thereby joined the ensemble.

My residency began in early September. We discussed ideas with the ensemble members, shared musical sources that inspired the project, and then created the music onsite in an ideal setting. We met for about fifteen hours a week over four weeks. Otherwise, I worked on the pieces and the structure that the work would take.

Two of the three pieces we developed and performed are recorded here, a decision made for both technical reasons (the maximum duration on one side of a vinyl record) and ‘legal’ ones (I had asked each member to share the musical work had most inspired them). Their answers to this provocation were diverse and often surprising. We extracted the essence of these pieces, not to reproduce them, but to filter them, distill them, transform them into ‘phantom’ versions. Or rather, into palimpsests. Some of these compositions are available for free in digital format.

But I’m omitting a vital detail: what is the source of the work, why Mes fantômes [My Ghosts]? The ghost, an ever-present figure in popular culture, is my starting point, but — make no mistake — I am invoking neither the esoteric image nor the phantasmagoric creature. Here, the ghost is a metaphor for the influences — conscious or unconscious, chosen, or imposed — that haunt all creativity.

My art is not a clean slate; it is the sum of accumulated, superimposed, sedimented presences. As in a tale or myth, the ghost appears sometimes as familiar, sometimes as a radical stranger. Recognizing my influences is far less a form of plunder or appropriation, and more a way of honouring them and acknowledging that no creativity arises independently. My ghosts are my companions, my adversaries, my guides.

— Érick d’Orion, in residence at the Studio du Québec in Paris [English translation: Scott Thomson, vii-26]

Spectra are the matter at hand. “Spectre” refers to the familiar figure of a ghost, while its close corollary “spectrum” refers to the decomposition of light into its constituent wavelengths. In this context, we speak of a colour spectrum ranging from violet to red. A spectrum is therefore also a range, a landscape stretching from point A to point B (A / B, like the sides of a record). Meanwhile, spectres hover, as in the expression, “the looming spectre of war.” In the case of the record in your hands, it is rather ghosts that are at issue as they metaphorically represent the artist’s influences, which, like hovering spirits, visit and accompany him while he is immersed in creation. But let’s not dismiss other implications too quickly for, here, it seems to me, the spectra at play are also amplitude, vibration, and suspension in the air.

Since the end of the last century, Érick d’Orion has been practising an uncompromising art. This seemingly banal statement places him in a category apart from other creators, indeed from other humans. Most of us — Érick d’Orion included — function through a complex network of habits, consensuses, and codes. Language itself is a string of sounds (or their representations) whose sequence constitutes a consensus within a given community. The invention of language was an attempt to make sounds useful. But that is just one example. In a radio interview produced by Rhizome (“La haine de la poésie,”[1] broadcast on CKRL in 2020, available on the Rhizome website), Quebec philosopher Alain Deneault discusses the neurotic currency,[2] a Freudian term referring to the lexical, behavioral, and conformist obligations of social life that weigh on the psychic apparatus. Aesthetic canons, he states, are part of this. He goes on to say, and I paraphrase, that certain authors, poets, and artists break through the pressures of the neurotic currency by following impulses, discovering forms that are neither obligatory nor imperious through a kind of irruption, by seeking something ‘inadmissible,’ whose impulsive dimension shatters the form, a straitjacket that the artist seeks to transcend. Thus, the work ultimately bursts forth in an almost pure mode of pulsation, almost devoid of form, a condition, Alain Deneault adds, that is a challenge to experience and comprehend.

Érick d’Orion’s sound art, by freeing itself from as many codes as possible — melodic, rhythmic, etc. — most closely embodies this de-formalization of which Deneault speaks. Let’s consider the spoken word. Isn’t it, first and foremost, a vibration of the air, something intangible that touches us? Yet it seems to me that Érick seeks, beneath such conventions, these surface layers, which, even before language, have the power to make both the creator and the receivers of a work vibrate in unison.

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[1] La haine de la poésie: https://productionsrhizome.org/portfolio/la-haine-de-la-poesie-une-serie-radiobalado

[2] L’effet du langage, an interview with Alain Deneault and Georgette LeBlanc: https://productionsrhizome.org/medias/leffet-du-langage

— Simon Dumas [English translation: Scott Thomson, vi-26]