The reason for the lit theory lesson is Hands in Our Names, the new album from Tuscon’s Karima Walker. Following on from last year’s Take Your Time, a folk release with drone flourishes, the new record sees Walker push further into experimental territory, utilising field/found recordings along with significant drone to create something which sits at the interface of singer-songwriter and avant-garde music.Opener ‘What is Left?’ sets this out. An open-world hiss is slowly populated by a variety of field recordings which skip and jump and repeat over and over, like the product of some malfunctioning record player, before the clips fall away and allow Walker’s song to start (in a traditional vocals-and-guitar sense). The ambient textures are ever-present in the background, and the briefest echoes of the recordings leech through, ghosts of that which previously occupied the space Walker now inhabits. ‘Holy Blanket’ is simpler though pulls the same effect, the foreground vocals sitting atop of a stack of time in which so much happened, while ‘Bells’ drops the words entirely in favour of click-hum drones which float and flash and fly above a backdrop of the natural world – birds and bees and the great hush of passing time.

The title track is a folk song in the old tradition, an a cappella hymn in which Walker loops her vocals until they become superimposed, the various lines overlapping into an echoed chant, a multi-faceted chorus descending into a hymenopteran drone as heard from within the hive.

“Gather as the dust, laying ‘cross the desert
Pillars of salt that turned to flee
My eyes in turning to my brother
My help does not come from thee”

‘To Carry Heavy Things Alone’ simmers beneath a subdued surface, clear intentions lost in the between-channel fuzz, while ‘Ky By Bo’ flickers forward and back before the entry of Walker’s crooned vocals. ‘We’ve Been Here Before’ opens with distant field recordings, the lonely drone like the slight vibration of air in an empty room, before the emergence of a melancholy folk song. The lyrics are gentle and warm and humane, simple words of comfort and perhaps love, as the ever-brightening background drone morphs into something like the sonic representation of hope. As the track concludes the song fades into static, Walker’s vocals lost to white noise as the listener passes out of range of the transmission, though the ambient note continues, the essence of her message lodged deep in our inner ear.

After the twitching interlude of ‘One Moved Slowly Through This Place’, the slow beauty of ‘St Ignacio’ arrives in a whistle of static, the vocals wide and shimmering across the first significant percussion. Again the mood is melancholic but compassionately so, a strange and tender dream where every action is poetic and perfect and perhaps portent to a future peace. Barking dogs herald the muffled ‘Singing City’, an instrumental which plays like the spectral murmur of an abandoned building, before ‘Indigo’ brings us back into the present with an altogether more hospitable quiet, a place calm and serene yet laced with sadness (“I’m too tired to throw stones / to hold this memory alone / Too stubborn to ask you to come back home”). The album closes on ‘Lullaby’, a song which serves as a neat summation of the album, placing the present as one thread within the dense tapestry of time, a small component insignificant to the overall pattern yet fundamental all the same.

“Sun dried sweat upon your back
sun drew laughing faces
Time will tell what we do lack
children take our places”

Fulfilling Funk’s post-postmodern vision, Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.

Hands in Our Names is out now and you can buy it from the Orindal Records Bandcamp page, including on some rather lovely cassettes. Walker is playing a release show tonight (June 30th, 2016) at Tuscon’s Exploded View, and then heads out on a tour of the southwestern states. Check out the full dates below:

6/30 Tuscon, AZ @ Exploded View
7/1 Bisbee, AZ @ Silver King
7/2 Las Cruces, NM @ Art Obscura w/ Our Friend the Mountain & Ehran Krauel
7/3 Albuquerque, NM @ Ocotillo Room w/Chicharra & Ermine
7/4 Santa Fe, NM @ Ghost w/Glitter Vomit, AJ Woods & Will Schreitz
7/5 Taos, NM @ Mesa Brewing
7/6 Colorado Springs, CO @ Welcome Fellow w/TBA
7/7 Boulder, CO @ The Forge w/Cy Phi, Luna May & Gardenhoe
7/8 Denver, CO @ House Show w/Boat Drinks
7/9 Grand Junction, CO @ TBA
7/11 Moab, UT @ House Show
7/12 Salt Lake City @ Diabolical Records w/tba
7/14 Nampa, ID @ Flying M
7/15 Boise, ID @ Studio 208 w/With Child & Spiritual Warfare
7/16 Baker City, OR @ Lone Pine w/Shannon Gray

Tape art/printing by Super Hit Press, photograph by Eugene Starobinskiy (& blanket by Karima Walker’s grandmother)

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Opening track ‘The Secret Thoughts of Housewives’ begins with crackles and pops and snippets of ambient recordings, before plaintive acoustic guitar frames a sad-sounding song that is explained pretty well by its title, and comes with a lovely video directed by S. Cagney Gentry.

“Oh I want to be gone when you get home tonight, alright
No I won’t be home when you get home tonight, alright
I want to be flying away into the night
When the baby is asleep, I will slip out in(to) the early morning light”

“Poppa got a dream gonna leave this Alabama
Said to mama ‘gotta get’ she said ‘No!’
Jumped in his camino, said ‘I’m off to California
Come and find me when you ready’ she said ‘No!'”

‘Postpartum Blues’ is a short (and actually devastatingly sad) song about the hidden darker side of starting a family, while recordings of family life permeate ‘When I Was an Island’, with its dream-like imagery and vocals that sound like I imagine Justin Vernon’s later records would sound if he would only abandon the autotune. ‘Om Family / The Death of Self’ sounds like a family meditation session, an incensed-scented mantra interrupted by the sounds of a child, which approaches the death of self that Daniels mentioned head-on.

‘I Take What I See With My Eyes’ has a slow and considered rattling drum beat and snaky electric guitar, adding layer upon layer as it builds towards its conclusion, hitting the closest thing to a crescendo on the record, a gloriously messy marriage of all the elements used so far. The penultimate track is an interlude of pure field recording, again self-explanatory titled ‘Anna’s Whistler Windchimes’, before finale ‘We Go Into the Ocean’ begins with a touching recording of a father and son being silly but also creating a pretty convincing ocean soundscape. Daniels then sings a song about the ocean to the accompaniment of his son’s seaside sounds, before they swap duties and Daniels’ son sings a (much more irreverent) song of his own.

It’s a beautiful end to a beautiful album, deep and ambitious but also somehow natural and organic, as if these songs were born from the picture they paint and not the other way around. You can buy The Teacher now via the David Karsten Daniels Bandcamp page.

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Described as an “LP vinyl set of music, art prints, essays and tide table”, Concrete Antenna sees the artists produce a substantial body of work inspired by their sound installation in the new tower at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Full of warm drones, the album is a neo-classical exploration of the environment, using field recordings from the local area and archival sound samples dressed with gentle electronics and minimalist piano. Think somewhere between Lejsovka & Freund and Benjamin Shaw. The result is something rich and evocative, packed with the slow, geological melancholy conjured by time passing over a landscape.

Check out the short documentary on the project below:

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This new EP, entitled Lights, is a continuation of the sound we have come to associate with Mt Judge. White creates an otherworldly ambience, influenced by acts such as Emeralds and Stars of the Lid. The music is also complimented by several field recordings which White made himself on a trip to Iceland, taken at Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavik, and around Mt. Akrafjall, which I believe is just across the bay. Iceland has a reputation for being natural and ethereal and Lights does little to correct this, channelling the warm beauty of bands like Sigur Rós to create gorgeous, breathing soundscapes. Perfect for putting on your headphones and watching the world go by.

Lights is available on cassette tape or as a pay-what-you want download from the Mt. Judge bandcamp page.

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Any project that aims to reconcile art, science and nature will be a project that attempts to capture as big a picture as possible. Rob St. John (who we recently featured as part of Bastard Mountain) is doing just that. As part of the Fixing Broken Rivers project by Thames 21, he is working in and around the East London area, recording what he finds via photographs, field recordings and written word. He recently walked the length of the River Lea in East London, taking field recordings as he went. The result was a collection of clips that capture the life along the river: people chatting, boats passing, aeroplanes flying overhead as swans land in the water. We are probably pushing our remit as a music blog in writing about this, but it makes for an oddly entrancing listen.

Add in the photographs and you begin to get a comprehensive view of the area, my foretold ‘big picture.’ The recording of everyday things, of life, come alive and conjure a newfound sense of wonder in what would normally be considered mundane. Rob St. John proves there is value in the marriage of science and art, and there is no reason why these ideas can’t be taken further. If their are any super-wealthy philanthropists out there whose fortunes are burning a hole in their pockets, might I suggest some grant-based movement that expands on this form, global projects utilising sounds and music and photgraphs, film and literature and oral history? I’m first in line.

The final result will be released sometime in 2015 as sound, photography and writing. Keep an eye on the Rob St. John Twitter page for updates.

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Romantic Works is, at least in part, centred around his experiences with stage fright and anxiety, with Henson using the album to explore the issues that have blighted his career as a live musician (‘Elevator Song’ is based upon an attack of pre-concert nerves while in a Glasgow lift). However, the stage fright metaphor/allegory is far from obvious or overwhelming, indeed I would have missed it had I not read the feature on Henson from The Independent. For me, on first listening to Romantic Works, the album sounds like the soundtrack to an arty film, in which even the simplest images and actions are melancholic and sad.

Irrespective of ulterior meanings, this is the album’s greatest achievement – how it seems to stand for a normal existence, its for lush and mournful instrumentation supported by field recordings, serving to highlight the beauty and sorrow of normal life. Again, ‘Elevator Song’ is a perfect example of this, with its poignant mood building up to the final recording of an automated voice warning on closing doors, rendering what at first seemed like a dramatic four minutes as something commonplace, a simple event. ‘Field’ uses bird song, ‘Josella’ the starting of a car, and each takes a familiar sound and gives it attention, supports it with traditionally ‘nice’ sounds of piano and cello, allowing it to it seem more important or meaningful. The album is at once tragic and beautiful, sombre and hopeful and lovely.

Of course, you could argue that my interpretation is not all that far from Henson’s intentions, and that fear and anxiety and the desire to run/hide is intrinsically linked with a modern ‘normal existence,’ opening up a whole new set of questions as to why this may be (and whether we have always been this way). It also refreshing and encouraging to see a young musician begin to describe and address these issues, and it nice to think that there is still a chance for artists to operate successfully under such stresses.

You can buy the album, as well as some nice t-shirts designed by the man himself, from Henson’s website, or stream it over at The Guardian.

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[NB. The underground experimental scene (that contains acts like Texas Harsh Noisefuckers Black Leather Jesus) is a fascinating, one, and a real eye-opener to the boundaries of music (you could would do well to start here, a nice interview with Svartvit on InLog.org). Be warned, this is something of an internet rabbit hole, and reading about increasingly bizarre acts is strangely addictive].

Springtime Return is a great example of ambient music done well. Using field recordings in conjunction with drone, the pair create four tracks that are atmospheric, ethereal and haunting. There is an irony here: for a project conducted primarily on computers or other electronic equipment, and indeed a collaboration that took place across half of the globe via email, Springtime Return is fundamentally organic. It is so layered and nuanced that it sounds like nature; like something ancient and important yet simple, the earth spinning, time passing, drip of water as ice melts on spring’s return.

The release is available in two lovely modes: a handcrafted CD or a tape from Bookend Recordings. For those of you without the necessary spare change can download a digital version via Bandcamp.

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