by David Wilikofsky
Karima Walker didn’t intend to record and engineer her latest album, Waking The Dreaming Body, largely alone in a makeshift home studio. She originally flew to New York in late 2019 to work on some tracks with collaborators; however, a sudden illness forced Walker to return to her home in Tuscon, Arizona to recover. The pandemic soon made it impossible to continue those recording sessions, so Walker decided to finish the album at home. Influenced by her desert surroundings, the resulting music is a fever dream that conjures up the vastness and mystery of the natural world.
It’s hard to know exactly what to call Walker’s compositions. The record moves between extended passages of ambient sound and more traditional singer-songwriter fare; at times they feel more like forces of nature than songs. “Interlude” conjures up wide expanses of open space and sky; “Window I” features minutes of what sounds like the tide flowing in and out. Some tracks cohere into recognizable song structures which others hover on the precipice of collapse. Walker’s vocals flicker at the edges of these soundscapes like a mirage in the desert, eventually dissolving back into the ether.
The lyrics mirror their backing tracks to some extent. Walker populates them with images of mountains, deserts and oceans, but she also cultivates a dream-like atmosphere, describing valleys “ringed in broken teeth” and mountains that “cut you in two”. Psychical and imagined worlds blur together, imbuing the music with much of its power. Listening to this album I’m whisked away to the seaside at dusk or the desert at night, filled with the beauty and terror of being alone in the wilderness. It’s music to lose yourself in.