Description
Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walkers 2017 standout album Hands In Our Names, which garnered praise from Pitchfork, MOJO, and Bandcamp. The album includes dense harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and Karimas dulcet singing voice. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient work and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous nights dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming. Landscape has always played a huge role in her work. Throughout Waking the Dreaming Body, Walkers 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 albums center, and watch the shifting desert landscape in your minds eye; from the babble of flash flood runoff to the slow parade of cumulus cloud shadows across the red earth, cactus and creosote, and then, moving backwards in time, the thunderous eruptions of ancient volcanoes that pushed the Tucson Mountains skyward. As indicated by the video for Reconstellated, Waking the Dreaming Body holds a deep connection to the environs in which it was created, the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest. The mountains, rivers and starry skies of Walkers 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 perfect balance of beauty and abstraction Mojo
Exquisitely crafted GoldFlakePaint
Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again 7.4 Pitchfork
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