Karima Walker’s musical output, both solo and collaborative, can feel miles apart at times. It’s a duality she is very much aware of but it’s a path she seems to effortlessly follow where others may find such diverse polarity a difficult and conflicting pursuit.
Take her recent collaboration with Katy Kirby, a lo-fi indie folk EP titled ‘Among Horses V‘. It is beautiful in its own way – all her work is – but it’s a very contrasting sound to that found on her forthcoming album Waking the Dreaming Body on which she presents a very deep and, what sounds like, a more personal sonic language. I enjoy this chamelon-like ability of Walker’s, it’s refreshing, at times more challenging for a listener but in turn more deeply rewarding. The music clearly pulls from the environs it was created in – the release notes tell us “Walker’s desert home are referenced in nearly every song she sings on the album, simultaneously grounding the action and imbuing it with a sense of otherworldliness.”
A prime example, if you are prepared to set aside 13-minutes and I encourage you to do so, is “Horizon, Harbor Resonance” is a visual journey along the Rio Grande River valley in New Mexico and Colorado…
The instrumental track is both pulsing and lulling, punctuated by tape whispers and lunar swells of organ. The video was shot and edited by Karima herself.
Karima Walker explains:
“I have performed parts of ‘Horizon, Harbor Resonance’ live for a couple years now, the piece initially developed after my last record. There’s a large cathartic rain that falls a couple times and stands as a kind of threshold for me during live shows. I have been obsessed with waves and tsunamis for the past few years (Harbor Resonance is an effect that happens during a tsunami, where the force of the wave is magnified when it’s contained) and this song was a way of working through that obsession.
“The video traces the Rio Grande River valley across the New Mexico Colorado border. Touring in the western US, on these long drives, I would enter a kind of altered state, watching the landscape change over many hours. This particular region stayed with me, and ended up inspiring large parts of the record and Horizon, Harbor Resonance especially. I remember passing San Antonio mountain for the first time. It’s the mountain you see toward the end of the video. It’s unattached to any range (a friend recently told me that it is the largest free standing mountain in the continental US), and rises up out of the desert as you leave New Mexico. It’s massive and takes a while to pass, marking the beginning of the San Juan Mountains.
“I wanted to share this special way of seeing with people, to stretch and compress time like in a dream, the way mountains will sometimes move like water as you move through a landscape over the course of a day, and how our experience changes when the ‘eye’ is steady or hand held. These ways of seeing change our perception and experience, and so too our participation in a place and our access and connection to it.”
The album Waking the Dreaming Body will be co-released on February 26, 2021 via Keeled Scales and Orindal Records on vinyl, CD, and cassette.
Pre-Order: https://karimawalker.bandcamp.com/album/waking-the-dreaming-body
Photo Credit: Holly Hall