Orit Shimoni – Lorem Ipsum

Stranded by a global pandemic in a city I wasn’t familiar with, after eleven years of total nomadism, I was lucky enough to find a quaint little apartment I could afford for a while. I rode the waves of hope and despair, for my own future and for the future of our world. Hope had been easier when I was on the road, encountering people’s smiles. Despair, too, was easier, in the company of others and with the balance of the magical experiences that riding trains and performing brings.

On one particular night, feeling particularly anguished by the state of the world, the extreme polarisation, the rising of willful ignorance and hate, it seemed too much to bear. I suddenly remembered a song I had written a few years back but had never recorded. “You’ve expressed this already,” I thought to myself, and began to remember there were others. I sat down and made a list of them. Eleven. Just seeing the titles brought some relief, as if gathering the loose melodic and textual threads of this pain was already therapeutic.

A failing, noisy laptop, a cheap microphone, and free, basic recording software, it struck me that the barrenness, solitude, and relative impoverishment of my circumstances made the perfect background and story for these songs. No ornamentation could be appropriate. No sheen. No sparkle. Just the bare-naked truth of it. And when the next wave of despair came, I remembered the list. I knew I had to record them all then and there in one session, and headed into an all-nighter. I made a record both of the songs, and of the time and place I was in: a solitary night in an apartment in downtown Winnipeg, full of despair, in isolation during a pandemic, knowing that singing and recording were acts of hope and survival.

Lorem Ipsum are the two words you see in graphic design, the textual place-holder so that you can choose the font before you insert your own words. Textual place-holder was exactly what these songs were: varied written articulations for the same basic feelings. With some extra digging, I discovered that Lorem Ipsum comes from the Latin Dolorem Ipsum, which means, Pain Itself. What was a design place-holder as I was figuring out the artwork for the album, became its official title.

It has been my practice for as long as I can remember, to use song-writing as the space for pain, and in sharing songs I have learned how necessary art is as a space-holder for what anguishes us. A shared space.

In this sharing, there is the antidote to pain itself.

Yours in song and gratitude,
Orit