Karima Walker - Hands in Our Names

Pitchfork 74

Karima Walker began releasing simple pastorals around a half decade ago, but quickly her songs morphed into something stranger. Inspired by her discovery of boundary-pushing composers like Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros, she’s taken to fusing her structured folk songs with abstract sound art. It’s something others have attempted before—think Will Oldham’s recent collaboration with the drone duo Bitchin Bajas or some of Charalambides’ warped spirituals—but this Arizona-based songwriter’s fusion feels particularly alien. Unearthly drones collide with slowly scrawled acoustics. Electronics overwhelm spectral hymns. Looped vocals and slivered field recordings lend an unsettled feeling to her work, which sounds born both of earth and stratosphere, here and hereafter.

Walker’s first full-length, Hands in Our Names, was conceived in the New Mexico desert. A few hours away from her Tucson home, she ventured to a remote house nestled in the midst of a grassy plain—the sort of Southwest residence that lets you see miles into the distance. (Crucially, she didn’t have cell service.) It was there that Walker worked on much of Hands in Our Names, which was released on tape in 2016, but has now been resequenced and remastered for vinyl. In so much as you can sense Walker’s need to get out of her usual world, Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again.

Opener “Holy Blanket” starts with a whisper, a wind through trees or a rolling stream, rustling through lo-fi gear. It sounds like a voice memo, an environmental memory stowed away for better days, but it slowly gives way to a strummed electric guitar and her voice, singing impressionistically about watching cosmic phenomena somewhere over the mountains. The track lasts just over a minute and a half before receding back into sumptuous layers of static. It’s a trick she employs throughout the record—moving between naturalistic sampling, to familiar-feeling folk songs, then ending on something harsh and cold. Similarly, the record’s title track weaponizes her voice in a sort of digitalist round. The piece swells and crackles as more and more layers build into a spiderweb of parts, until it’s a wall of noise.

One of the record’s best moments is the narco-drone folk of “St. Ignacio.” Walker starts by approximating the snowbound gloom of the Kranky stable, but her dedication to emotional openness and wonderfully lightheaded vocal runs lends an unusual lushness to the proceedings. The track flowers as it goes on in unexpected ways—and the feeling’s something like stumbling upon a jungle in the arctic, or a beach on the moon. When Walker was recently asked in an interview to distill Hands in Our Names to a single word, she called it merely “terrestrial.” And sure, she made it in the desert. But with her uncanny Americana, it’s as if Walker’s experimental inclinations have allowed her to explore some previously unplumbed liminal space on the horizon, somewhere between sand and sky.