Cîpayak Joy is the new album from Ghostkeeper, the ever-evolving project of Métis pop experimentalists Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle. In recent years, the band has been operating as a full five piece band – and they still are – but this particular missive from Ghostkeeper offers a new take on their sound; it's at once a bold step forward and also a return to some of the band's earliest roots.

Cîpayak is a Cree term that translates as 'the ghosts are dancing' and it is often used to describe the Northern Lights. Originally in the running as an alternative to the Ghostkeeper band name, Shane and Sarah finally adopted it as the moniker for their collective visual art practice, which had its debut at Contemporary Calgary in April of 2020 with their interactive piece Four Words Challenge. That show included a few pieces of music the two had spontaneously cooked up with tech wizard and longtime engineer Brad Hawkins, and following this initial jolt of inspiration, the three began descending to the basement for a string of collaborative, off-the-cuff sessions. These sessions quickly became defined by new working methods that were the direct inverse to those that have produced the “Ghostkeeper sound” to date, and the three uncovered some truly fresh new sonic territory for the band.

“Brad would come down to the basement, Sarah would work up a drum beat, and I'd start improvising, coming up with different vocal ideas and other melodic parts, finding the songs in the sounds,” Shane recalls. “It was all about being immediate, with no premeditated ideas.” This 'no songs first' approach of Cîpayak Joy was a radical reinvention of their creative process, but more than anything else, this project represents a return to that core band trajectory that Shane and Sarah originally laid down in their halcyon days. And, possibly in keeping with this sense of coming full circle with the band, Shane and Sarah decided to reach out to Jay Crocker, one of their oldest musical associates, to bring his highly unique perspective to the album.

Jay Crocker is a multi-faceted composer, producer, and musician living on the south shore of Nova Scotia. He's well-known in experimental music circles for his run of JOYFULTALK albums on the venerable Constellation Records, and has co-produced the last three albums for Sackville-based songwriter Jon McKiel, including the critically-acclaimed Bobby Joe Hope. And perhaps more crucially, Crocker also played guitar in one of the earliest Ghostkeeper band lineups, which led to him recording and producing their albums Ghostkeeper (2010) and Horse Chief! War Thief! (2013).

While the band initially approached him with the idea of mixing a few tunes, Crocker, as he often does, saw the project from another angle, and the band eventually gave him carte blanche, as producer, to re-imagine the album as only he could. 'I wanted to see what was in there,' Crocker says, and with an arsenal of samplers, drum machines, and synths, he dug in. Once he began excavating the songs' innards, he compared his working method at times to collaging; with his keen eye for detail and almighty hook, Crocker would locate an element of interest (a vocal riff, a drumbeat, a synth sparkle), pluck it from its original context – sometimes literally stretching, inverting, or otherwise wholly manipulating the existing material – and put it back together in new and unexpected ways. Even Crocker himself was surprised at how radical some of the reinventions were, admitting “I don't know if I've ever taken it as far as this, just stripping the whole thing back to the vocal and re-building the song around that.” He likened the process to “building a digital sculpture of something that was,” but ultimately he viewed his role in the classic producer/artist mold; “I tried to give the songs whatever they needed - or didn't need.”

Cîpayak Joy is replete with strangely inviting, otherworldly noises and a raft of sounds, rhythms, and textures that borrow liberally from trap music and reveal a sly interest in sounds and rhythms from the futuristic-sounding sonic architecture of contemporary R&B acts like FKA Twigs, Doja Cat, Vince Staples, and Rosalía. From the chirping, digitized cicada sounds that open first single “Lipstick” and the minimal beats and floating, effected vocals of “Sleep Dream” to the auto-tuned vocals and celestial synthesizer environs of “Dark At The Helm”, the album is a bold new sonic language for the band. And when one does hear a familiar sound, such as the acoustic guitar that snakes through album opener “Astum Ota”, it's filtered through a pleasingly psychedelic lens. Elsewhere, minimal synths, playful hi-hat syncopations, and dub-like snare hits radiate into the background, samples of speech intermingle with hallucinatory shifting textures and smeared voices. The end result is endlessly engaging, singular, and, as both Ghostkeeper and Crocker insist, impossible to create without the other.

This record does indeed foreground the core duo of Shane and Sarah, but they are highly aware of the fact without the tech savvy and good vibes that Brad Hawkins brought to those initial basement production sessions, this project would not have materialized (and the record also benefits from a few remote contributions from live band members Eric Hamelin and Ryan Bourne, who supplied drum sounds and synth samples at various stages). And despite the fact that Crocker's role in the birth of Cîpayak Joy is crucial enough to have part of his band name added to this album's title, he is also quick to point out that 'it doesn't happen without Shane and Sarah. I just try to contribute whatever magic I can. It's just good to be a part of it.'