And now for a Tiny Desert Concert...that’s when we bring local bands into the KJZZ studios to play a couple songs for us and talk a bit about the music.
Hear from Tucson musician Karima Walker. Her music falls somewhere in between folk and experimental.
"I got really tired of a certain female archetype in music and fulfitlling an aesthetic requirement and then just being really bored," Walker said. "It doesn't always feel good to labor over a song that maybe carries a lot of emotional weight and kind of darkness and then maybe all you ever hear is 'that's really pretty.'"
Though Walker is just one person, she uses a guitar, two tape decks, and a number of audio effects to process and layer her sounds which include field recordings she’s made of natural and ambient sounds.
Her performance includes visual elements, projected onto a white sheet behind her.
Full conversation
KARIMA WALKER: A lot of the sounds on the tapes were taken from my phone or they were put onto tape, digitized, manipulated, put back on the tape. I do love tape, and I love the four track because it helped me shape this, like a gradient.
I really wanted to be able to control how a sound would move in and out of the set. And you can kind of do that with, like, a digital sampler, but I'm not as familiar with them, and I wasn't ready to like, incorporate a computer. So the tangibility of the tape and like, the simplicity of these four tracks that you can like, move in and out, it helped me shape the nature of the set as this like continuous thing.
MARK BRODIE: So you referenced that you use different sounds, like ambient sounds in your music. Are you just like, walking down the street and you hear something or see something and think, “Oh, that'd be kind of cool?”
WALKER: Yeah, I'm like, hyper-sensory-oriented, and the video has helped me dig into that more, too. And that's exactly how it is. Like walking through a cityscape or being out in the desert or taking sounds from one place and then, like, performing them in other places and then taking those back home with me, and that was really instrumental in helping me kind of reshape my project from a songwriter project.
BRODIE: So do you just have, like, a giant archive of ambient sounds from Tucson and other places, somewhere in your house?
WALKER: Yeah, it's growing, too, but it's also on like, all these different places. So it's like, voice memos on my phone. I've got a Zoom recorder, tapes and then like, notes of things that I've heard, like, kind of just bookmarking with paper places to go, but they're all over the place.
(Music)
BRODIE: It sounds like, from your description, that you went from being, and I apologize for this word, kind of a conventional singer and songwriter, to what you do now, which, to me, at least, does not seem conventional, really, in any way.
WALKER: I got really tired of a certain female archetype in music and fulfilling like an esthetic requirement, and then just being really bored and finding that, oh, it doesn't always feel good to labor over a song that you know maybe carries a lot of emotional weight and kind of darkness, and then maybe all you ever hear is, “oh, that's really pretty.”
And I mean. This band Human Behavior based out of Tucson. And I think spending more time with Human Behavior helped me kind of connect with other facets to things, and also moving back to Tucson, being exposed to metal again, and really getting into some more experimental and electronic music that was taking up space, which as a solo performer is kind of hard to do, especially if it's just you and a guitar.
BRODIE: It strikes me that you are kind of, in a sense, like an audio documentarian, that you are taking sounds that are that have some kind of meaning to you, whether it be, you know, like personal or just from a specific place, or has a memory or something, and you're incorporating it into the music, much the way a film documentarian would sort of take images of stuff that is around them and show them to other people.
WALKER: Maybe like a dream documentarian, because I like narrative, I guess, just in general, but I also kind of consciously decided to not enforce one. But it's also like a very internal thing. These sounds are very satisfying to me for reasons that I sometimes know and sometimes don't.
And I kind of really enjoy that that's just that might only make sense to me in this sort of backwards way. But I think that even though it's like my sort of dream vision, when you present it to people, I am also creating video in a very similar kind of way that people connect to it. It's more dream like, I guess.
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
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