øjeRum - Don't Worry Mother, Everything Is Going to Be Okay (2019)

øjeRum “Don’t Worry Mother, Everything Is Going To Be Okay” 
(Shimmering Moods Records, 100th Release)

All the worry and the sorrow. All the anger and the guilt. All the resentment and the regret.

When faced with the death of a loved one, it’s difficult not to fight, as the rising maelstrom of emotions swallows you whole. Sometimes the most difficult thing to do is accept.

And the storm never truly stops. Sure, over time it subsides: grief is brought under control, and slowly, slowly, life resumes a sense of normality. But it’s a new normality. More melancholic, certainly, and often haunted by regret. Anger is a difficult feeling to sustain and soon subsides. Guilt is rightly rationalised away. Worry is superfluous, and sorrow, despite what it might feel like initially, sorrow too becomes more manageable. A background constant, sure, but one that informs rather than interferes – that often dulls but now rarely dents.

On the other hand, regret can flare without warning, as raw and as unforgiving as the day it was first realised. Or it can simmer in the background, a constant nagging. And the most painful regrets are not for those things we did (that’s mostly guilt), but rather for the things we didn’t do. Things we can never now do. Things we could have done and things we should have done. Things we could and should have said.

Things undone produce the most lingering of ghosts.

But slowly you learn to cope, accept that what is done is done, and what was not done, can’t be done. You slowly learn to live with your sorrow and to become slightly anonymous, neither sad nor happy. With a calm mind, you can allow yourself the acceptance of this new state of being.

And it is here that we join øjeRum on this, the 100th Shimmering Moods Records release. Recorded live with no over-dubs and only the most minimal post-recording editing, these two long tracks are subtly different from much of øjeRum's exceptional back-catalogue. They are more oblique, less explicitly emotional than past works. This release isn’t trying to elicit a particular response from the listener, it is instead discrete: the music is content just to be. The approach could be said to be soothing (Track A, Don't worry Mother especially), yet this is not the purpose – just a by-product of an expression of the acceptance of being.

With Track B, Everything Is Going To Be Okay, the melody and structure are looser: things develop and dissolve as time stretches out, and the music seems to be coming from all around, yet from far away.

And yet, listen intently, and there is throughout it all a touch of the eerie, of something missing. A hint, however elusive, of unease. A quiet, buzzing distortion undercuts Track A, Don't worry Mother. Track B, Everything Is Going To Be Okay builds and builds. and just as you detect a sense of tension or disorientation or ‘wrongness’, it twists away as if to avoid capture.

It’s regret. The ghost of things that had no chance to be said.

Don’t worry Mother, Everything is going to be okay.