Waking The Dreaming Body (studio album)
by Karima Walker

From Mercury 03/03/2021 22:40

(A very interesting blend of contemporary folk and more psych/avant folk aspects and drone and ambient as well. If you like Grouper or other slow building, ambient-drenched folk music, you'll like this.)

On the whole this album is very good. The melodies and the songs and whole package at times, I will admit, bored me. On first 2 attempts to listen to this all the way through I admit I switched it off by the time the long "Window I" went into its long field recording/ambient middle part. BUT today I listened a couple times all the way through and I can say there is a certain something about what Karima Walker is attempting to do with this album that is somewhat inspiring and certainly inspired.

The entire album flows as an experimental collage of sounds that feel like a dream. Full of poetry, sound experiments, looping environmental sounds, bits of acoustic folk, and a general feeling of surreal, sleepy, dream-like exploration. The song "Horizon, Harbor, Resonance" is mostly an instrumental, mostly a dreamy straight up ambient track that, while beautiful and delicate, is a bit too long for me at 13 minutes. Maybe its just that when I have heard this album I wasn't really on-board with an ambient detour, but I just wasn't fully engaged with that substantial portion of this album. Just after that epic is the most direct and most beautiful folk song on the album, the title track that is. Its gorgeous, her vocals are like a soft sad whisper and the guitar is warm and gentle and the melody makes me swoon.

Just in general a good to great experimental folk album that deserves lots of love and attention. I, for one, will be looking forward to future releases by Karima Walker based off this genre-bending album.