Karima Walkers Hands in our names vinyl

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.