øjeRum - Without Blood the Sun Darkens.

Album: Without Blood the Sun Darkens

Artist: øjeRum

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 135^th Cycle

Tracklist:

1.      Without Blood the Sun Darkens

øjeRum is Danish musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski, and on this release we’re presented with an hour-long track of sweeping cinematic ambient that’s highly melancholic, brooding, and inward-looking. It’s a soundtrack to loss and longing, a hymn to trying to capture something, a feeling or an emotion, that was experienced but fleetingly and has now faded into memory. It almost feels like the deep regrets held by someone dying, an immense sadness about a life wasted or a momentary decision that had life-long consequences: tears run down a face, eyes lifted to the shimmering stars, and a silent plea to perhaps turn back time.

There is no other phrase for this but hauntingly beautiful: a tad trite and unsatisfactory perhaps, but there are times when words are inadequate and fall short of a mark. Despite the deep wells of sadness evident on here, it is simultaneously uplifting and soaring. Think of a stunning landscape, seen under the blue, purple, and red sky of dusk, where day hasn’t yet succumbed to the blanket of night but stars are beginning to shyly peek out of the veil of blue, streetlights and lighted windows pinprick the last remaining silhouettes of earthbound geography, and everything takes on an air of mystery. Upon a hill somewhere, a lone and unknown musician plays a lament to how time takes all away from us in the end, how it is that only the living possess memory, and also that we shape and distort our remembrances of people and events.

In the end, no matter who we are, whether we were important or otherwise, we leave all behind, and the shape of our lives dissolves – and the further away in time the finer the particles of what we were become until they too disappear. øjeRum’s musical tapestry weaves all the emotions and feelings associated with things we wish we’d done or not done, and the resulting narrative drifts into the wide open spaces of the celestial aether. Perhaps it is only there that our memories exist, forever travelling between the stars, and becoming a part of the panoply of Creation.

Simply stunning.

Psymon Marshall, 2019.