by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Although he’s become much-maligned in recent years, there was a time in American cinema where there was no more graceful marrier of the physical and spiritual bonds in nature than Terrence Malick. In his 2011 epic Tree of Life, the transcendental imagery connected the entire infinite history of our universe into the finite existence of a 1950’s Texan family. Multidisciplinary artist Karima Walker isn’t from Texas but Arizona but her music would have suffused with Malick’s style excellently if a collaboration had ever arisen. Her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body, demands to be placed in nature. The songs float and flutter in those hazy moments between sleep and waking life, when we are relying solely on our reduced senses rather than full awareness.
Walker self-produced (aside from C.J. Boyd’s upright bass in “Window I”) the record from her makeshift home studio in Tucson during lockdown and one can sense Arizona’s natural landscape at every turn. Thrumming field recordings fill tracks like “Softer” and “Interlude” and fully place the listener in the environs. Locations are mentioned throughout (“Sonoran sky plays a movie”) and there is clear reverence for the place. It’s where Walker wants to be, connecting to the earth. Listening to the album is to feel alone on a ridge, between a blanket of stars and desert, vastness above and vastness below.
“I know where I am but I can’t tell where I started,” Walker sings on the beautifully haunting opening track “Reconstellated,” and this is what informs the rest of the record. She desires to leave her past behind, craving connection to something deeper. There is a recurring theme of watching nature from a moving car. She is detached, not yet one with nature. “And if I feel the edge with my fingertips, is it softer than I imagined?” Walker asks during the titular track, reflecting her desire to be with the mountains, the earth, the desert. The only time the lyrics are unambiguous are during the swaying “Window I”: “Another year in debt / Can’t afford to feel / What I should instead.” Walker wants spirituality but is grounded by reality for once; the relatability of her words are welcome.
Wavy ambient droning washes over the closing track “For Heddi” and the long and repetitive “Horizon, Harbor Resonance”. The latter drifts like a boat passing slowly through moonlit fog on a blessedly calm water. “Softer” and the titular track are classic acoustic guitar folk and yet Walker mixes her styles well; she sounds comfortable being both a straightforward Americana performer and an experimental artist. Her album as a whole hums with profound yearning and reckoning. Much like Malick’s art, it will both comfort and alienate those who find it, depending on one’s acceptance of what Walker is trying to locate.