KARIMA WALKER

Ethereal, spiritual folk-meets-sound abstraction, via Tucson, Chicago and the volcanic island of Jeju.

For a long time, Karima Walker’s songs were private. She’d take her grandmother’s guitar everywhere, but the music she made on it was never meant to be shared. “Growing up in Tucson, around the metal and hardcore scene, it was difficult to connect to that,” she explains, from the kitchen of her Arizona home. “I was so incredibly shy about people hearing my voice.” Then, in 2010, emerging from three years of an undisclosed but intense social situation, Walker started putting her emotional energy into music. “Some roommates of mine were working through depression,” she explains, “I had my own peripheral processing to do too, and music became a cathartic release.” With the assistance of Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, Walker gradually transformed herself into a singer-songwriter. “I’d tell myself I was going to write a song,” she says, “and sing it to myself. Then I’d share that song with someone. This process, of turning that out into the world, has taken a very long time.” Following a year and a half teaching English on the volcanic South Korean island of Jeju, Walker returned to Tucson and made a brace of quiet, bewitching folk records. The first, 2012’s A Good Year, gently interlaced Walker’s voice and guitar, but 2015’s Take Your Time EP employed pedals, effects and percussion to add warmth and depth to her songs of ritual, sadness, and beauty. “With each record I was choosing how much of myself to share,” says Walker of these releases. “I was thinking, Something’s missing here.” Unsure of her stage presence, Walker reinvestigated Tucson’s metal scene, immersed herself in the work of Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros, and studied the “dry reed” sound of Willie Nelson’s voice and the super-quiet production of recent Bill Callahan albums. Exploring ways to incorporate her beautiful singing into the dimensional ambience of the recording process, she cut together tape loops, field recordings, and voice memos with sparse guitar-and-drums arrangements to create new strange topographies for her songs. “I felt like I was going in blind,” says Walker. “I wanted horizons to feel present, a landscape that people were moving through.” Originally released on cassette, and recently reissued by Owen Ashworth’s Orindal Records, Hands In Our Names is a perfect balance of beauty and abstraction, Walker’s delicate voice now occupying a dreamlike place somewhere between the dry Arizona environment and the fabric of the record itself. “It’s meant to sound like a space between two worlds,” she agrees, “something very alive.” Inevitably, her use of collage has changed how she regards songwriting. “Lyrics don’t have to carry an entire record any more,” Walker concludes. “My performances now feel like I’m working from a recipe, adding ingredients whenever I need them. I just have to be careful not to over-mix the dough.”