Karima Walker – Waking the Dreaming Body LP Keeled Scales

Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walker’s 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 Karima’s 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 night’s 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, 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 watch the shifting desert landscape in your mind’s 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.