[Cover image Kato headshot credit to Jeremy Amar]

Kramer has announced that a new LP is coming up, venturing again into the ambient realm, this time alongside multi-disciplinary Japanese artist Kato Hideki. The duo’s new record, The Walk, is the debut collaboration between these two experimental composers. It will arrive on August 23rd, 2023, via Shimmy-Disc.

The Walk explores “the intersection of 21st century musical artistry and the age-old form of the written word.” Hideki and Kramer create a soundscape that interweaves their inspiration by poets Basho and Robert Walser.

They have shared a new track from the record, titled “The Calling”. This ambient soundscape “highlights the tranquility of nature as interrupted by the human intelligence that pastes itself upon the emptiness of nature, and the tragedy that naturally ensues.”

Discussing how the collaboration came to fruition, Hideki remarks:

We started working together in the late summer in 2023, discussing the thematics and the sonic palette of the album. We shared strong connections with the writings by Robert Walser and Basho – both of them walked, dreamed, lived and died on the road.

Kramer recalls:

I’d waited decades to find the right ‘environment’ in which to create music in dedication to this great prose writer and poet, and in 2023, I found that it was not ‘the right environment’ that I’d been waiting for, but rather, the right collaborator.

What we hear in this album is a collaboration between two artists who trusted each other to create transcendent music:

Kramer adds:

This months-long act of co-creation I have shared with Kato for The Walk has made me as happy to be alive as Walser and Basho were so happy to be alive while on their walks, as evidenced by their extraordinary descriptive powers, knowing that the world around them – so simple yet so very complex – made life so wondrous, and so well worth the sometimes seemingly insurmountable struggles of finding a way to survive Today, so that we might try again Tomorrow.