“The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is,” said Jean-François Lyotard during a 1986 lecture at the Wellek Library. “It is a mixture of pleasure and pain.” Because, he continued, “Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.” Such an aesthetic experience proved key in the formation of Waking the Dreaming Body, the latest album from Karima Walker, released jointly this month by Orindal Records and Keeled Scales. “[The record] was influenced by my preoccupation with natural sublime phenomena,” Walker explains. “Tsunami videos and the dreams of ocean waves I was having last year, large mountain ranges that can only be seen by a plane or over the course of a day of driving.” Within such forces lies both magic and dread, and as she continues:
These images allowed me to think about immense horror and beauty—something that overwhelms but simultaneously is so hard to look away from, something that holds violence but also reflects a better understanding of ourselves in the context of that immensity and scale. Looking out and looking within, and knowing that the divide is false, but feeling the pain of that division nonetheless.
This dual process of acknowledging and questioning borders is key to Karima Walker’s work. Occupying a variety of niches across the artistic spectrum, the Tucson-based interdisciplinary artist has long probed in directions both various and wide-ranging, extending across visual and performing arts to include collaborations in fields as distinct as sculpture, creative non-fiction and dance. Though even within the discrete category of music, Walker’s art maintains a multifaceted approach. In working as both a songwriter and a sound designer, there is a dichotomous quality to the Karima Walker style, a dualism between modes that might be complementary or contradicting.
Written, performed and engineered by Walker alone (with the sole exception of bass from C.J. Boyd on one song), the release is a product of both isolation and connection, the former fostering the latter in strange ways. In confronting the surrounding environment and considering her place within it, Walker traces lines between the self and the outside so that such boundaries might be challenged and blurred. “I wanted these songs to stand alone as complete worlds,” Walker explains, “and this required a shift in my usual way of writing. I found myself trying to escape from an excess of interiority by exploring outward, by thinking about the mirroring that happens when you seek connection to others and to the natural world—when you try to bring the outside in.”
The sublime of Waking The Dreaming Body is therefore not an attempt to realise the limitations of one’s mind à la Lyotard. Rather, it is an exercise in locating such limits in order to eventually surpass them. “I sought to make arrangements that swell at certain moments and barely hold together at others, moving with my breath and other rhythms connecting my body to the natural world,” Karima Walker continues. “Ultimately, I was seeking to draw myself out, to reconstruct my personal narrative.”
Written and recorded in seclusion, and often possessing a sense of distance and yearning, it is clear that this objective is far from simple. But there are moments on the record where the possibility flickers in life, brief snatches of some potential future where even if the borders are not conquered, we might perhaps learn to be present within their confines, come to accommodate for their shape.
Today we have the honour of sharing the record’s title track, coincidentally one of the closest encounters Walkers manages with such an experience. “This was the last song I wrote for the record,” she explains. “It became the song that was able to bridge, with a certain kind of peace, a space that I had been in for a long time. It moved from a stuck-and-in-between place to the place I was physically in, which was beautiful and singular. I was outside and camping and I think you know the feeling I’m talking about. All the uncertainty and fear spilled out into something very present and joyful.”
The earth it is shaking she’s taking a breath
while the rest of us hold it
There’s no use in explaining, there’s nothing left
no use in it’s naming
And if I feel the edge, with my fingertips, is it softer than I imagined?
And if I crawled inside you, I mean it I could just die here
between the starry dome above and the rocks beneath my feet
Karima Walker was also kind enough to share a live performance of the track, which, recorded at home, strips back the already minimalist sound into something even more intimate.
Waking the Dreaming Body is out via Orindal Records and Keeled Scales on the 26th February and you can pre-order it now from the Karima Walker Bandcamp page.
Photo by Holly Hall