Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin

Award winning artists Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin announce a new radical, collaborative album symbiont, out September 27th via Smithsonian Folkways, and share the lead single/video “My Way’s Cloudy (feat. Joe Rainey).” An album in two acts, symbiont is a dialogue with the ancient and anterior. The listener is met with rising tidewaters, massive droughts, and the appearance of an iconoclastic uprising amidst the world’s indifference. Questions of future or present tense swirl as the duo unspools the intertwined threads of racial and climate justice. Obomsawin says, “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky. The music of symbiont is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”

Obomsawin and Blount’s “genrequeer” approach to their respective traditions has earned them a place in some of the same archives from which they have extracted their repertoire for this album. In defiance of genre, revisionist histories and linear time, the artists have made an Indigenous and Afrofuturist folklore that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny. Mali and Jake employed shape-note hymns, spirituals, Caribbean banjo tunes from the late 17th century, sequenced beats and synthesized drones, screaming electric guitars, and more to create the album.

Folk musicians tend to use terms like “the folk process” or “oral tradition” to describe the conservative versions of the production process. But the word most widely used in our era is one that folk musicians with nostalgic, self-conscious aspirations to rurality have generally shied away from: remix. Jake and Mali embrace the term and concept with symbiont, and turn it on its head. The duo explains, “symbiont is a remix album. The works included here synthesize instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of “hard” science). The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont—and also to points of intense conflict.” 

Mali and Jake continue, “This record reflects not only the natural harmonies that exist between our individual and cultural perspectives, but also an arduous process of reconciliation through remix. symbiont is a precisely honed sound mythography born from the same process it champions: the cultivation of a shared future through care, respect, and sacrifice.” The process entailed stitching together multiple traditions from both of their cultures and giving certain significant plants a compositional role through modular synthesis.

The single “My Way’s Cloudy” is a spiritual collected from formerly enslaved Black people at the Hampton Institute—mere miles from where Jake’s family originates. The arrangement features vocals from renowned Red Lake Ojibwe singer Joe Rainey as well as a synthesizer controlled by Blount and an  aloe barbadensis plant. The video, directed by Lokotah Sanborn, was filmed at the Penobscot Nation and features Selena Neptune-Bear and her nieces Carmella and Layla Bear.

Blount (pronounced: blunt) is a renowned interpreter of Black folk music recognized for his skill as a string band musician and for his unprecedented Afrofuturist work in sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) is a celebrated composer and bassist-vocalist in free jazz and experimental music. Known for her evocative and ground-breaking debut Sweet Tooth, Mali’s work as a composer and bandleader centers on the imprint of Indigenous music traditions in jazz and “American” genres, using historical, archival, and community research as a spine for improvisation. Deerlady, Obomsawin’s shoegaze project with guitarist Magdalena Abrego, released music in early 2024 and has quickly won over young punks and sadgirls across Indian Country—cinching Mali’s reputation as an artist uncontainable by genre.