Last month Indonesia-born, Toronto-based songwriter Dwi Riana released their new EP, Jambu Tree, a bilingual release which draws on everything from folk to hip hop to realise its distinctive exploration of the immigrant experience. Single ‘WTFAI’ is a perfect introduction, a love-hate ode to their new home which does for Toronto what The Weakerthans’ ‘One Great City!’ did for Winnipeg. “My first winter in Toronto, it got down to minus forty degrees,” Dwi Riana explains. “People told me that it was the worst winter they’ve had in twenty five years. The next winter, it was the worst in twenty six years, and so on… I thought to myself ‘Where the fuck am I?'”

Jambu Tree is out now and available from the usual places.

ghost orchard – Sweet Song

Last month we wrote about ghost orchard, the project of Sam Hall from Grand Rapids, Michigan, describing single ‘rest’ as “a picture of calm and patience amid loss, where the quiet stillness holds the latent warmth of things now gone.” The song was the opener from the debut ghost orchard LP, rainbow music, which came out last week via Winspear. The album is a meditation on themes of home and change and the tangible echoes that remain when people move on, preaching patience and acceptance in a world that seems determined to rush by. This atmosphere is captured nicely on penultimate track ‘Sweet Song’, a bittersweet bedroom pop song that holds much tenderness and feeling in its sub two minute runtime.

g. spinn – We Might

Based in Tucson, AZ, g. spinn is a recording project unafraid to push the boundaries of genre. Since its formation in 2018, he has released music across the spectrum, from meditative ambient album summer’s long gone to singles more at home in hip hop, pop and indie rock brackets. New EP Nostalgia Melancholy draws from various points of this oeuvre, with single ‘We Might’ showing off the hybrid ambient-folk style. Wistful field recordings and warm acoustic guitar paint a mood fitting for the EP’s title, and the track’s pivot to lush ambient tones in its middle section only further cements the sound’s reflective quality.

Joan Kelsey – Survivor

“In a time of tremendous difficulty I tried to make something life-affirming: grieving songs which look toward joy.” So explains Seattle songwriter Joan Kelsey of new album Standing Out On The Grass, out later this week on Dear Life Records. A collection of songs written in the aftermath of loss, the days and months when grief arrives fresh with each moment, a thing at once personal and universal and impossible to ever quite overcome. But as single ‘Survivor’ shows, Kelsey does not try to conquer this sadness but instead place it within a wider context. Layer death into a larger, interconnected picture where the cruel linearity of time and space is upended, and nothing is ever really gone. Watch the video by John Desousa below:

Standing Out On The Grass is out on the 11th November via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Mui Zyu – Ghost with a Peach Skin

Next February sees the release of Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, a brand new album from London‘s Mui Zyu (AKA Eva Liu of Dama Scout) on Father/Daughter Records, and lead single ‘Ghost with a Peach Skin’ gives a hint as to what to expect. “This song is about leaving your former self and entering your new peach skin,” as Mui Zyu explains. “Peaches are considered a symbol of longevity and even immortality in Chinese culture. The protagonist has overcome enemies and has bruises to prove the damage.” The track achieves the effect sonically, the sound itself bruised by distortion even as Zyu’s vocals progress with a calm confidence, the voice of a protagonist who is stepping out from the past and into something new. Check out the video directed and edited by CLUMP Collective below:

Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century is out via Father/Daughter Records on the 24th February and you can pre-order it now.

Philippa Zawe – Would You Lean

Ahead of upcoming EP Shudder Pt. I, Philippa Zawe has shared brand new single, ‘Would You Lean.’  Writing of previous release Road of Hope, we described Zawe’s work as a combination of “folk and soul… built around her versatile voice,” the delivery “switching from casual conversational comments to strikingly effecting croons to produce something that ebbs and flows with human warmth.” The new track is no less impressive in this regard, though builds on previous releases with an increasingly rich arrangement of instruments. A sound capable of exploring themes of loss, friendship and faith with a decidedly compassionate tone.

Sassyhiya – I had a thought

Rising from the ashes of cult LGBTQ punks Barry, Sassyhiya is the project of London-based partners Kathy Wright and Helen Skinner. Recorded during lockdown, their debut EP gum demos introduced the irreverent charm of their punky, poppy sound. But now with the addition of Pablo Paganotto of Punching Swans (drums) and Neiloy Mookherjee (guitar), Sissyhiya are now a full fledged live band. New EP Live at Paper Dress Vintage captures this newly charged form in all its idiosyncratic fun. Opener ‘I had a thought’ is as good an introduction as any, adding scrappy attitude to the original, taking the angles of post-punk and bending them into off-kilter shapes, leading to something somehow both laidback and volatile.

Thavoron – Twin Sized Bed

Back in April, Seattle-based songwriter Thavoron shared single ’18’ on Trailing Twelve Records, a tender and intimate track which explored the queer experience with dreamlike warmth. The song was relatively stripped back with its careful arrangement of flute, saxophone and guitar, but latest single ‘Twin Sized Bed’ leans more fully into the minimalist folk style. Built on stark guitar and gently emotive vocals, it’s a song concerning the often difficult process of coming to understand and accept yourself brought to life with all the stark solitude of such an experience.

‘Twin Sized Bed’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

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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

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We’re placed into a sense of youthful hopelessness from the outset. ‘Stuck Neverlasting’ is a direct and angry song about growing up in the internet age.

“So shell shocked by the complexities
and my mind
and all the rest that is still left to be defined”

‘Sensory Deprivation’ is about being in your twenties but still not quite an adult, while ‘Heart Container’ explores coping with challenges both past and future, and the seemingly mundane tasks we concern ourselves with to help get by (“so I’ll play single player role playing videogames until I die,” Llinas sings, “while playing through Earthbound for the seventh time”).

‘Stamina’ is the best song about arguing on the internet you’ll hear all year, capturing the use of cool ironic detachment to escape any sense of knowledge or belief. This is followed by, ‘Living Room at Noon,’ perhaps the brightest beam of light on the record. “I think there’s a future in,” Llinas sings. “Dissolving into kindness, becoming one with the lightness”.

Final track ‘Self-Diagnosis’ is one of the record’s saddest, based in the aftermath of a breakup. But despite the emotional turmoil, the record ends on a glimmer of something better, the indication that the narrator hasn’t given up completely.

“And I just hope one day
that everything will be okay”

On Velvet Waltz, Human Kitten sounds at once frustrated and patiently resigned, destructively apathetic and bursting at the seams with feeling and love. It’s an existential crisis in the age of Snapchat and Twitter, anger and irony twin masks that attempt to hide hurt and vulnerability.
You can get the album now from the Human Kitten Bandcamp page.

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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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