Up from Within: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman

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No one  anticipated the release of Karisha Longaker's debut cd “Up from Within” more impatiently than I. Her collection of songs in this cd is a coming of age celebration and ritual announcing the presence of a new young artist. Though intensely personal, it is also upliftingly mythological and practically rooted on solid earth.

Understand first,  “Up from Within” is a piece of Folk Art.

Second, her guitar and vocals were captured live by two mikes and burnt onto cd disk.

That’s it.

No layered harmonies or instrumentation. She has stripped everything down. There is no fluff, and her voice, rhythm and guitar plucking are delivered all relaxed and raw at the same time.

For at least the last 7 years previous to the release of Up from Within Karisha crafted her art as a welcomed contributor with other local performers adding her layers of harmonies and flourishes to collaborative work. Since release of this personal first CD she has moved on, joined forces to form MaMuse "One Voice Divided". with Sarah Nutting. But here she offers herself up - alone.

Karisha  digested those collaborative experiences, taken much that is recognizable from them, and here - made them elementary her own. 

Here is one example.

In the second song:

Breeze blows in on off the water

Lift me up!

I am your HOLY daughter!

Her hero’s assumed claim “ I am your HOLY  daughter” slips by almost unnoticed. Karisha slices the first syllable of “holy” into about 7 odd descending pieces with rhythmic and fluted vocals. So, we are carried into a hero’s journey in the arms of a breeze. Listen to the guitar intro and vocal clip here. 

Taken together, these songs present a personal inventory of a hero's journey, what a sense of self is based on, who is owed, the nature of the gifts to be conjured, and where Karisha herself intends to go. The songs lead us through an interlocking series of assessments, thanksgivings, purification rituals, prayers, battles and battle cries, rallies, and ends with a benediction.

The journey she takes us on is intimately personal and evokes mythos appealing to deep commitments and sacrifice, with character enough both worldly, earthy & self-aware enough to be immediately useful.

Author and teacher, Joseph Campbell, lamented toward the end of his life that:

We are living in a period I regard as a period of the terminal moraine of mythology. It is a lot of mythologic rubbish all around. Mythologies that have built civilizations are no longer working that way (and) just in ruble all around us.

But Karisha, with her lyrics is pulling those pieces of rubble back together, refashoning them. The very first song begins exactly where it should: “Still, perfectly still/ and open”. Then we listen as the voice inside her hero coaxes;

You’re unraveling your stories

You are moving back inside

You are gathering these bones and this body

Weaving them into present time. 

Taken individually there are a couple great songs, like the ode to friendship “Miss Avalanche” and the passionate “Living Love”. But the great strength of this cd is the collection of songs, songs that together take us on this mythic hero’s journey, for the whole is more than a simple sum of the parts.

Essential to this journey is the song “Up from Within” which takes us into battle, and taking the offensive, repeatedly asks the same question over and over again, “Aren’t you glad to be living?” Our unspoken answer flips the great abyss from “No!” to “Yes!”

But this divide between “No” and “Yes” is both this work’s center focus and greatest weakness. It is a span too great to be crossed by any artist or person. It is the great question of the album – and of the human culture it informs. We live on a planet finite and mortal, and perhaps humans are to answer that question on behalf of the planet - in this generation.

In her own way, Karisha is actively assembling for us, from old mythic ruble and her generous and meticulously personal accounting, a little holy gold-winged scarab-beetle  - that flies in todays world.  Accounting the cost and knowing the risks, all her songs bravely beg the question,"Aren't you glad to be living?"

In so asking she demonstrates herself a gifted musician, composer, poet, songwriter, singer and story teller; perhaps like Bob Dylan, a working American singer and dancer . Whatever surprises she prepares for us during the coming years as a performing artist it should not come to us a shock, for she has recorded here, for those of us going that way, an informed demonstration of personal talents, and available resources, and delivers us both inspiration and a useful and practical beacon for sustained effort, direction and intent.

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Still . . . I've been wrong before . . . 

The cd “Up from Within” can be ordered on line at www.karisha.info.
MaMuse’s debut album All The Way and BRAND NEW Release Strange and Wonderful are available for purchase locally in Chico California at: Lyon’s Books, Made in Chico, The Chico Peace and Justice Center and Bustolini’s Deli, or ordered on line from their website,
or from cdbaby by clicking below.

 All The Way

 Strange and Wonderful