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Name: Karima Walker

Nationality: American
Occupation: Songwriter, composer, musician
Current Release: Karima Walker's Demos is out via Orindal / Keeled Scales.
Recommendations: Etel Adnan’s paintings of Mount Tamalpais & Maria Stepanova’s book, In Memory of Memory

If you enjoyed this interview with Karima Walker and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, and twitter.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started making music in my early 20s. First in folk, it was the inclusivity, no need for highly specialized skills. Easy, approachable, and because of a program in Chicago, practically free for me to learn.

I loved the intimacy and strangeness of lofi, naturalistic recordings. Things that, by design or limitation, broke apart more polished approaches that I had passively absorbed up till then. And great songwriters, that broke through to me too.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

When I really trust what someone is doing, on deeper listening, there’s usually an integration of images running through my head with the sudden feeling of being seen by the work.

Physiologically, it’s a rush. It makes me want to be as honest as possible in what I’m making and to honor what surfaces during my creative time.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I grow best when I’m nourished by the good work of other artists, and when I get to connect to my community in meaningful ways. The often smaller, restorative economies of friendship with musicians and listeners, playing music together, traveling together, hosting each other in our homes. That rhythm of life and those conversations are so vital to me, as an artist and a human.

Breakthrough for me is when I’m in a joyful and challenging flow-state of creation, when I’m generative and connected to my intuition. It doesn’t often fully makes sense in that moment, and so, doesn’t yet feel like it’s mine.

When I look back at what I’ve already done, thinking about my work in an analytical way, looking for what’s me, it feels like a caricature when I try to implement it in the present. But being present to what’s there helps me stay oriented.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I often feel like an in-between person, culturally and socially. I like work and production with lots of space and intimacy, that moves between genres.

Whether or not it cares to, it often accounts for or challenges my perceptions and expectations, in that it’s taking me through a landscape; unfolding, undoing … some kind of understanding. (It’s not so heady, though I might be making it sound that way.)

I hope to make work like this too.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

For a while now, I have been interested in the moment one thing becomes something else.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I appreciate both.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Field recording, because it always carries the sense of a particular place and time. Demos and going outside often fall into this category too.

Trying to find what feels alive in those performances, aside from nostalgia or charm … asking myself: how can I bring those alive parts deeper into the editing process.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Full night of sleep, coffee, listening to a record while stretching / doing yoga, journaling, lots of reading, more journaling, eating, playing with an instrument and lyrics, reviewing / editing earlier recordings, exercising outside, more writing, making dinner, rest andd a good movie.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Recently, I’ve been writing songs more quickly. I surround myself with words and chords and images and track where my attention takes me. I record that line of attention, and then go back into it later.

The dearness of it lies in that I am making decisions quickly, and trusting that my attention is composition, that my intuition is guiding me. It’s magic, or divination, and it feels abundant and available.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I almost always work alone. I think there’s something wonderful about fully executing a vision, but the times I’ve collaborated, it was immensely joyful.

When you’re working alone and you get stuck, it’s hard to step away from that heavy, lethargic kind of preciousness, hard to change things up. I want both.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Good music is life changing, a companion, a comfort, encourages one to live more fully, with agency, with love.

I don’t always know how my work relates to the world. I get a glimpse sometimes, when I hear something meaningful from a listener. I have ideas about how the difficult and tense parts of what I do, alongside the consonant grounding parts, offer a kind of hospitality to a listener who in turn offers their attention. That they make meaning in that exchange, beyond what I could construct alone.

Our world gets bigger and richer as these loving / meaning networks grow, we heal and we care about each other.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I don’t usually approach the questions directly, unless I am trying to use philosophy or therapy.

The wonder or large existential thing that I try to articulate, it comes out, (often by surprise) in the particular, in symbol and metaphor, with dream logic. It’s the feeling of being lost and then found in the story, yours or someone else’s.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

All my lofty thoughts about humanity, play and consciousness keep getting interrupted with how both of these fields are exploited in capitalism, reduced to products for consumption and war.

It would be cool to see these disciplines teach each other to be unappropriat-able. Something about the stories that scientists and artists tell about what it means to be human and how to be a human, undoing the colonial and imperial narratives of mastery and exploitation.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

If there is flow, intuition, and frightful, existential joy-sorrow available to a barista, then I don’t believe those have to be different. I worked as a barista, a server, a sound engineer, in behavioral health etc .. and never felt those things.

I believe that more often than not in this society, as an employee, our bodies and our labor is exploited and so it is probably very difficult to access these beautiful and sublime things while you’re on the clock. When you are living as an artist, in a mundane job or outside of one, it’s a privilege to have the time and resources to access these big and beautiful things.
 
But I do believe that there are doors everywhere, especially if your mind is still your own, while working a job. If you get to be awake while you work. I had a job as a seed technician last year where I collected grass seeds that would be used to remediate a site, where a mine had left a big dangerous mess in the landscape.

I learned to read the landscape for different grasses, all the overlays of texture. I listened to books and albums while I worked and walked through beautiful places. My mind was my own and I felt like I was contributing to a living piece of land art. That’s the closest I’ve gotten in a job.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

The power of mind / body consciousness and knowledge to filter and shape what we hear into something we listen to. Our instincts, our awareness, they shape listening and hearing, and then it’s kind of mysterious how it bounces around inside our bodies and memories to become meaningful and moving.

Maybe the answer lies in resonance, physical and figurative, so you ring like a bell whether or not you can explain it.