Kato Hideki & Bonner Kramer Announces ‘The Walk’ LP & Share “Tranquility” Single + Video

Kramer is again gearing up to add a brand new LP to his acclaimed catalogue, venturing again into the ambient realm, this time alongside multi-disciplined Japanese artist Kato Hideki. The duo’s new record, The Walk, is the debut collaboration between these two maverick composers.

The Walk is the ultimate ambient journey, exploring 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, creating an auditory monument to listening and crafting a new way to see and hear the world. The Walk carves out a haven to hear space beyond what the physical body experiences – an immemorial Walk for the listener, without ever leaving home.

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.”

Today, they share the first track from the record, “Tranquility”. The soundscape illustrates a world in stillness, in a string of interrupted silences, wholly void of human ego, void of the chimera of “free will”, void of all but the sound of the void itself.

Ambient music was Hideki’s and Kramer’s natural middle ground, meeting there to breathe sonic life into the literature of the poets. “I’d waited decades to find the right ‘environment’ in which to create music in dedication to this great prose writer and poet,” Kramer recalls, “and in 2023, I found that it was not ‘the right environment’ that I’d been waiting for, but rather, the right collaborator.”

Kato Hideki & Bonner Kramer ‘The Walk’ album artwork

The Walk Track Listing:

SIDE A
Tranquility
The Calling
The Walk
The Phantom

SIDE B
Impermanence

Digital Only: BONUS TRACK(S)
Awakening