Waking the Dreaming Body＜限定盤＞

アメリカはアリゾナ州から世界を構築してきたドリーミーSSW、新作!

アメリカアリゾナ州ツーソンを拠点にサウンドデザイナーとSSWとしての実力を武器に活動するKARIMA WALKER。名門KEELED SCALESからリリースされる新作「WALKING THE DREAMING BODY」は彼女の意識と無意識が交差したドリーミー作!

タイトルの通り夢に由来する音が目立つ本作。『RECONSTELLATED』の電波を受け取るようなSEとそっと寄り添うようなしかし芯が通った華麗なボーカルが、夢の中にいる感覚に誘う雰囲気が象徴的。対して13分に及ぶ『HORIZON, HARBOR RESONANCE』のアンビエントに振り切った無意識の感覚を、自然の景色が次々と出てきて雑然としたMVと共に音で表す姿勢に、彼女の実験精神が垣間見える!リスニングで違う世界に行った気分を味わってみたい方特に必聴!!

A multifaceted visual artist, writer, and musician based in Tucson, Karima Walker released her first set of intimate acoustic guitar songs in 2012. Before long, she began combining her distinctly poetic folk songs with sound experiments that utilized field recordings, tape loops, and synthesizers, culminating in her 2017 full-length debut, Hands in Our Names. Four years later, Waking the Dreaming Body, a collaborative release between small-scale, boundary-crossing indie folk labels Keeled Scales and Orindal Records, continues in the spirit of that album, offering a gentle, shape-shifting mix of meditative song, poetry, and sound exploration. It begins with a combination of acoustic guitar and glitchy sustained tones on Reconstellated, with Walkers calm, whispery vocals entering with the stanza: Sonoran sky plays a movie/Draw a line to the stars inside of me/Write it down, tell your friends/I know where I am but I cant tell where I started. The songs gauzy aural textures and drifting, connective thoughts evoke a dream state from the start, and the album never strays from that quality as it passes through songs, instrumentals, and longer experiments. Following another song and a minimalist Interlude made up mostly of layered tones, the nearly nine-minute Windows I combines elements of all the above. It starts with a sung tune and a murky, out-of-tune piano that accompanies Walker like a worn vinyl record -- in a room with various lightly percussive sounds. That leads to a section of environmental recordings and tape loops that establish their own wave-like rhythms. That track is followed by the shorter, coda-like Windows II, a more confused confluence of noise and harmonic tones under Walkers light vocal melody (Heard you crying in your sleep/Crying wake me, wake me....). Windows II and everything before it effectively set up Horizon, Harbor Resonance, a hypnotic, 13-minute quasi-instrumental (there are two lines of text). It changes timbres, density, and dynamics through a series of overlapping, sustained tones that eventually gravitate toward a structured chord progression -- and the sounds of wind and a heartbeat. Waking the Dreaming Body then closes with a cathartic folksong (the title track) and three minutes of soft-footed, otherworldly electronics (For Heidi). Artful, delicate, and mesmerizing throughout, the albums subtle, gradual suspense may find some straining not to miss a moment. ~ Marcy Donelson