demos (KEELED SCALES/ORINDAL RECORDS 2022)

On demos, Tucson, AZ singer, songwriter & sound designer Karima Walker shares early, home-recorded versions of songs from her critically acclaimed 2021 folk/ambient album Waking the Dreaming Body, alongside illuminating sketches and ambient pieces. The demo versions of “Softer,” “Window I” and “Reconstellated” feature alternate lyrics and intimate acoustic arrangements that highlight the power of Walker’s voice and musicianship, while ambient pieces like "thunder interlude" and "earth into air" plumb deeper depths of tension.

"I first notice how vulnerable it feels, to hear certain lyrics sticking out, different from the words that finally stuck. But I do like returning to these songs, remembering why words shifted and settled as the songs took shape, and remembering that so many of these did not appear as immediately apparent and whole.

"They’re a lot more like my everyday life, revealing itself in time, while I try to let things register in my body... Then I go back in and push things around and figure out what I’m doing… Others are knit together from other projects, pieces and fragments that inspired the emotional timbre of the record, and in some cases were woven directly into it. Some here did appear complete and whole, but I either forgot about them, lost them or saw them as outliers. Either way, I like how the pieces hang together as a simpler account of the time from which the record finally came, and I hope you do too.” - Karima Walker

WAKING THE DREAMING BODY (KEELED SCALES/ORINDAL RECORDS 2021)

Tucson artist Karima Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within her music has never been so articulately explored, or imbued with as much intention, as on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

The follow-up to her 2017 album Hands In Our Names, Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed and engineered entirely by Walker, with the exception of bass from C.J. Boyd on the song “Window I.” Producing the album on her own wasn’t Walker’s original plan, though. A sudden illness forced her to cancel recording sessions in New York, and soon after the pandemic ruled out the possibility of returning. 

Instead she made the record at her makeshift home studio in Tucson. She spent the following months recording, processing and arranging her self-described “messy Ableton sessions” into densely harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and her own dulcet singing voice. 

“I sought to make arrangements that swell at certain moments and barely hold together at others, moving with my breath and other rhythms connecting my body to the natural world.  Ultimately, I was seeking to draw myself out, to reconstruct my personal narrative.”

The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient compositions (as in the instrumental “For Heddi”) and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, as in the album-opener “Reconstellated” and the title track “Waking the Dreaming Body.” This ebb and flow recalls the liminal states of half-sleep. 

Throughout Waking the Dreaming Body, Walker’s uncanny sound design evokes the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest. Close your eyes while listening to “Horizon, Harbor Resonance,” the thirteen-minute instrumental at the album’s center, and sense the shifting desert landscape; the slow parade of cumulus cloud shadows across the red earth, and then, moving backwards in time, the thunderous eruptions of ancient volcanoes that pushed the Tucson Mountains skyward.

Keeled Scales / Orindal Records

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND, SOLIDARITY COMPILATION (KEELED SCALES, 2020)

(no longer available)

Dear Listener, 

We are proud to offer this collection of recordings in support of the Estok'Gna (also known as the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, a name originally given to them by Spanish colonialists). After surviving centuries of oppression, genocide, and erasure the People of the Land still face threats to their life-ways and human rights. 

Three liquid natural gas terminals and pipelines are planned which would desecrate sacred village sites and historically significant areas. Border wall construction threatens to bisect their ancestral homeland and sacred river. 

Due to Texas' new ALEC-sponsored overly-punitive law (HB3557), the Estok'Gna could receive felonies and significant fines for occupying and praying at their sacred sites in the path of so-called "critical infrastructure." 

The Texas Railroad Commission has given the green light to these projects without adequate environmental impact study. These projects stand to destroy important life-bearing estuaries and 331.5 acres of habitat for 21 endangered species including the ocelot, jaguarundi, and northern aplomado falcon. 

As indigenous people continue to lead the fight against the reckless fossil fuel industry, we are honored to offer this compilation and its earnings in solidarity with everyone in the fight for racial justice and a livable future for all beings on planet earth. We will be donating 100% of revenue from this compilation directly to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas (the Estok'Gna) as they reclaim their land and culture and fight continued genocide and environmental racism. 

Kin Campaigns (Joyful Noise, 2020)

A compilation of covers, each supporting a progressive candidate running for US Congress in November. Curated by C.J. Boyd and featuring a tapestry of artists, this collection of songs benefits congressional campaigns who are not accepting corporate PAC money, and who are fighting for crucial policies like Medicare for All and The Green New Deal. Help expand the Squad by buying these tunes.

released October 2, 2020 

All proceeds go to support these campaigns until the November 3rd election. 
After the election, all proceeds will go to Brand New Congress, a federal PAC helping regular working people (AOC, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Paula Jean Swearengin, etc.) run for office without corporate cash and push progressive policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare For All.  
brandnewcongress.org

Among Horses V (Son Canciones, 2020)

A farm in the middle of nowhere. Sixty Spanish horses. And two songwriters who do not know each other, strangers with the same destiny... The critically acclaimed songwriters Karima Walker (Tucson, USA) and Katy Kirby(Nashville, USA) were dropped in a retirement home for old horses by the Barcelona based label Son Canciones. They were given one week to get to know each other and write and record five new songs.

After the success of the four previous "Among Horses" releases, Karima Walker & Katy Kirby's EP seeks to find its place in the record collection of everyone who loves unhurried music and lo-fi indie folk for a lazy day in the sun.

Only solar power was used in the making of this EP. The songs were recorded mostly in one take and without special effects. Straight from the soil into your headphones.

Hands in Our Names (Orindal, 2017)

Hands in Our Names, the first full-length album from Tucson, Arizona experimental musician Karima Walker, is a hypnotizing patchwork of drone, folk, psychedelia, field recordings and tape loops. Equal parts gorgeous and abrasive, comforting and confounding, Hands in Our Names builds abstract song-collages from disparate sonic components, isolating and harmonizing a wild array of instruments and textures across the span of twelve interwoven tracks. Hands in Our Names is dizzyingly abstract at moments, but taken as a whole, the album moves like a half-remembered travelogue, with Walker's understated, measured and beautiful singing voice acting as a compassionate tour guide through a wrecked landscape.

The Orindal edition of Hands in Our Names is a remixed, resequenced and remastered version of a self-released 2016 cassette that went out of print almost immediately, but not before grabbing the attention of discerning music blogs like Yab Yum West, Raised by Gypsies and Wake the Deaf, who named Hands in Our Names one of their favorite albums of 2016.

"Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all." - Wake the Deaf

Take Your Time (self released, 2015)

 

Tracked and mixed at 513 Analog by Catherine Vericolli and Dominic Armstrong
Mastered by Kim Rosen at Knack