“Opposes the Western idea that indigenous cultures are somehow inflexible and backward looking, highlighting the continuous process of resistance and adaptation required to survive in the face of colonialism.” So we wrote of the work of Mali Obomsawin back in 2022 with the release of her full-length Sweet Tooth, a record which drew on everything from jazz, folk, Wabanaki stories and Catholic hymns to “explore contemporary indigenous life and celebrate its endurance and creativity,” as we continued, “even when faced with great violence and cruelty.” However, the success of the album raised a number of questions for Obomsawin, not least how the music industry treats Native work, and her own own role as citizen of the Odanak First Nation, an Abenaki community in Québec, within this exploitative dynamic.
It is this experience which ultimately came to shape Automatic, Mali Obomsawin’s new full-length, coming this autumn again via Out Of Your Head Records. The period saw the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer gain access to a vast quantity of ethnological recordings of the Abenaki language made in the mid-1900s, material previously held exclusively at Obomsawin’s alma mater, Dartmouth College, allowing her to delve far deeper into the history of her ancestors than ever before and reclaim the material from the outsiders who seized it. What results is a record crafted by an Odanak person directly from Odanak voices, working against the external curation and contextualisation which can drain a culture of its life. “Behind Automatic is a deep awareness about institutions’ predatory relationship with Native material,” Obomsawin explains. “I wanted to make a record that institutions couldn’t own.”
A host of collaborators help bring the sound to life, with Andrew Broder (turntables, electronics), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Allison Burik (bass clarinet), Yuma Uesaka (tenor saxophone), Noah Campbell (tenor saxophone) and Zack O’Farrill (drums) all lending their talents, as well as longtime collaborator and other half of Deerlady Magdalena Abrego (electric guitar). But in truth the record’s cast is larger by orders of magnitude. Because, with help from Broder’s turntables, Obomsawin is able to reclaim a community from within the ethnological study, her work not aiming to chisel the material into a neat narrative but instead liberate the authentic chorus of voices from which it was made. “The turntable is an instrument that explores time and temporality,” as she continues, “and is able to give a form of agency to the ancestors in the recordings.”
The lead single and title track of Automatic offers an encapsulation of this style. Here, Obomsawin’s own voice is presented alongside that of her great-grand relative, Malian, eroding the temporal distance between two individuals and thus collapsing the distinction between then and now. If the Western act of studying and recording the Abenaki people was a process of commodification, then Automatic represents the opposite. Not merely a repatriation but a complete reversal, Obomsawin taking that which has been desiccated for preservation and rehydrating it so that it might once again exist in its natural form.
Photography by Nolan Altvater Gerard, graphic design by Neosha Pendergraft