Tip! A series of ghostly ink drawings and scanographs by eRikm, accompanied by a mixed sound piece, with sound texts freely inspired by fragments of stories about the universe of the Yokai, these ghosts and supernatural creatures that inhabit Japanese mythology, between hypnotizing soundscapes and bewitching instrumental devices.
"Or bringing out the invisible, summoning ghosts. Having, to my knowledge, never encountered any ghost or other ectoplasm, the idea of representing some of them in graphic form seemed to me perilous. Only clichés came to mind. After a few sinister sketches, these croquades animated my taste for allegory. Just as I did when I first met the HANATSUMiroir ensemble, I took the Styx and grimaced in ashes.
The antechamber where we had met was a cramped, windowless space. In order to minimize the resonances of this thankless volume, we fixed at arm's length black legs on the walls. The room swelled with funereal waves under a neon sky. In this tormented atmosphere, the strange feeling of not being three, but four entities, was the trigger for Echoplasme. Flautist Ayako Okubo seemed to share the same feeling: she cautiously confided to me that it was certainly a yōkai. Being a novice on the subject, Ayako introduced me to this component of Japanese culture. Yōkai can be a spirit, an object or an animal. They often manifest themselves first, by noises in the dark.
The genesis of this musical piece was developed on listening to what came out of nothingness. From the gray point chaos, either the pictorial avant-garde of Paul Klee or the struggles with the ghosts of Francis Bacon before painting. 'Before painting, many things happened. Get rid of everything that weighs, of everything that precedes, even before the painting is started.' Not wanting to be subject to my own conveniences—namely my practice of figurative drawing—I threw ink on limestone or wood. Make my own tools. To venture into territories of paper whose purpose is to reveal in everyone, a pareidolia. These acts are improvisations, gestures fixed on paper. They are intimately linked to my practice of sound, to walking, to meditation. This series of inks and scans is a non-exhaustive selection made during the 2020 syndemy. With the dryness of my inks, these necromantic blandices have dissolved." - eRikm
