A multifaceted visual artist, writer, and musician based in Tucson,
Karima Walker released her first set of intimate acoustic guitar songs in 2012. Before long, she began combining her distinctly poetic folk songs with sound experiments that utilized field recordings, tape loops, and synthesizers, culminating in her 2017 full-length debut, Hands in Our Names. Four years later,
Waking the Dreaming Body, a collaborative release between small-scale, boundary-crossing indie folk labels Keeled Scales and Orindal Records, continues in the spirit of that album, offering a gentle, shape-shifting mix of meditative song, poetry, and sound exploration. It begins with a combination of acoustic guitar and glitchy sustained tones on "Reconstellated," with
Walker's calm, whispery vocals entering with the stanza: "Sonoran sky plays a movie/Draw a line to the stars inside of me/Write it down, tell your friends/I know where I am but I can't tell where I started." The song's gauzy aural textures and drifting, connective thoughts evoke a dream state from the start, and the album never strays from that quality as it passes through songs, instrumentals, and longer experiments. Following another song and a minimalist "Interlude" made up mostly of layered tones, the nearly nine-minute "Windows I" combines elements of all the above. It starts with a sung tune and a murky, out-of-tune piano that accompanies
Walker like a worn vinyl record -- in a room with various lightly percussive sounds. That leads to a section of environmental recordings and tape loops that establish their own wave-like rhythms. That track is followed by the shorter, coda-like "Windows II," a more confused confluence of noise and harmonic tones under
Walker's light vocal melody ("Heard you crying in your sleep/Crying wake me, wake me...."). "Windows II" and everything before it effectively set up "Horizon, Harbor Resonance," a hypnotic, 13-minute quasi-instrumental (there are two lines of text). It changes timbres, density, and dynamics through a series of overlapping, sustained tones that eventually gravitate toward a structured chord progression -- and the sounds of wind and a heartbeat.
Waking the Dreaming Body then closes with a cathartic folksong (the title track) and three minutes of soft-footed, otherworldly electronics ("For Heidi"). Artful, delicate, and mesmerizing throughout, the album's subtle, gradual suspense may find some straining not to miss a moment. ~ Marcy Donelson