KAZIMI

Artist Bio

“I never sat down to make a record. I don’t think I would’ve started if I had.”

For most of her life, KAZIMI played music alone and in secret. She crafted songs as a way to work through life’s peaks and valleys but they were never meant to be shared. When the world stopped, something in her changed and that change led to the writing and recording of her debut album, River Run.

The New York-based singer-songwriter offers up her personal brand of indie-folk with tracks that explore the trials of being a living, breathing human: betrayal and heartbreak, pleasure and resilience, the death of loved ones and the rebirth of self. For KAZIMI, the project was an opportunity to dethrone the internal demons that lurked in the shadows of her mind. “Part of making music is letting go so there can be space for magic to enter the room, but giving up control is not something that comes easily to me. I had to constantly recenter the importance of making something true over the temptation to chase perfection.”

With a soundscape that drifts effortlessly between dreamy, seductive, cinematic and folky, River Run is as evocative in its style as it is in its storytelling. The title track was written in an empty hotel lobby in Nashville at the height of quarantine in 2020, “I was driving from Texas to New York. Passing through Memphis, I crossed the Wolf River and something about the name stuck in my mind. That evening I went downstairs and sat at the keys. I hadn’t had a piano to play in 4 months. Over the course of the time I wrote the song, I never saw another person. No other guests, no staff. Just me alone in a hotel, singing to the walls.”

Swimming in the depths then soaring through the clouds, the record traces the journey of a path unknown. The very act of making it, says KAZIMI, is a victory. “I am following what makes me feel most alive, even though I don’t know where it will lead. I found an ember and I held it close. I blew on it until a fire burst forth because that was the only thing left for it to do.”

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