Hands in Our Names

Hands in Our Names, the first full-length album from Tucson, Arizona experimental musician Karima Walker, is a hypnotizing patchwork of drone, folk, psychedelia, field recordings and tape loops. Equal parts gorgeous and abrasive, comforting and confounding, Hands in Our Names builds abstract song-collages from disparate sonic components, isolating and harmonizing a wild array of instruments and textures across the span of twelve interwoven tracks. Hands in Our Names is dizzyingly abstract at moments, but taken as a whole, the album moves like a half-remembered travelogue, with Walker's understated, measured and beautiful singing voice acting as a compassionate tour guide through a wrecked landscape. The Orindal edition of Hands in Our Names is a remixed, resequenced and remastered version of a self-released 2016 cassette that went out of print almost immediately, but not before grabbing the attention of discerning music blogs like Yab Yum West, Raised by Gypsies and Wake the Deaf, who named Hands in Our Names one of their favorite albums of 2016. "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." - Wake the Deaf

On her first full-length, Karima Walker fuses structured folk songs with abstracted sound art to create an uncanny Americana.