Karima Walker has announced a new EP called demos, which collects sketches and outtakes from her 2021 LP Waking the Dreaming Body. It’s out April 1 via Keeled Scales/Orindal Records, and today Walker is sharing a new track from it titled ‘how it falls apart’. Listen to it below, and scroll down for Walker’s upcoming tour dates with Advance Base.
“I was a long distance runner in high school, and would go whole miles spelling this word: e-s-t-c-e-q-u-e,” Walker said of ‘how it falls apart’ in a statement. “A French word that means something like ‘does’ or ‘is it such that?’ Something about the rhythm of this word just kinda fit with how my body was moving. I still think about this when I run. The patterns of my breath, notating or mapping a landscape. For this piece I wanted to see what would happen if I looped this pattern and sang over it. The lyrics pull from this same time period in my life, when I was on the edge of doubt, questioning the stories and beliefs I took for granted up until that point.”
The demos EP includes demo versions of the songs ‘Softer’, ‘Window I’, and ‘Reconstellated’, featuring alternate lyrics and stripped-back arrangements. Walker explained:
I first notice how vulnerable it feels, to hear certain lyrics sticking out, different from
the words that finally stuck. But I do like returning to these songs, remembering why
words shifted and settled as the songs took shape, and remembering that so many of
these did not appear as immediately apparent and whole.
They’re a lot more like my everyday life, revealing itself in time, while I try to let things register in my body… Then I go back in and push things around and figure out what I’m doing… Others are knit together from other projects, pieces and fragments that inspired the emotional timbre of the record, and in some cases were woven directly into it. Some here did appear complete and whole, but I either forgot about them, lost them or saw them as outliers. Either way, I like how the pieces hang together as a simpler account of the time from which the record finally came, and I hope you do too.
Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Karima Walker.
Karima Walker 2022 UK Tour Dates:
7 Apr – Hull – New Adelphi Club
8 Apr – London – The Lexington
9 April – London – St John on Bethnal Green (Daylight Music)
10 April – Hastings – The Piper
12 Apr – Brighton – The Prince Albert
13 Apr – Bristol – Cube Cinema
14 Apr – Oxford – Port Mahon
16 Apr – Edinburgh – Sneaky Pete’s
17 Apr – Glasgow – Hug & Pint
18 Apr – Manchester – Gulliver’s
19 Apr – Wakefield – Chantry Chapel
