Grooved Whale

Here's a wholly new approach to making music for and from whale songs. Walker plays violin into underwater landscapes, and the resulting recordings are wonderfully rich raw material for her studio-based compositions. Aquatic canyon walls and open spaces create a cathedral-like presence to her sound, and she builds the pieces around especially interesting and well-recorded whale songs. She adds electronics that range from spacy to funky, and while the overall tone is embracingly atmospheric, she avoids new-age cliches, using her classical training to forge a musical response to the whales that has a musical complexity that remains delightfully lyrical. Walker has spent years pusuing three complementary paths: classical music training, cutting edge media technology, and field research in Alaska. She brings these diverse gifts together here in a way that will appeal to listeners across the soundscape spectrum.