“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.” That’s how we described Automatic, the new full-length from Mali Obomsawin forthcoming next month via Out Of Your Head Records. The album emerged from the aftermath of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer’s previous record Sweet Tooth, namely the experience of how the music industry handles and markets Native work, and sees an artist grappling with questions around their role and responsibilities as citizen of the Odanak First Nation within this predatory world. This time, she was determined to resist any attempts to co-opt or extract unfairly. As Obomsawin puts it: “I wanted to make a record that institutions couldn’t own.”
Having gained access to a vast quantity of ethnological recordings of the Abenaki language made in the mid-1900s, Obomsawin set about creating a record steeped in the history of her ancestors, working against the traditional concepts of curation and contextualisation to allow the material its own life. “With help from [Andrew] Broder’s turntables,” we continued, “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 title was the perfect embodiment of this style, Obomsawin placing her own voice alongside that of her great-grand relative, Malian, dissolving the span of time between them so that both might exist on a common plane. “If the Western act of studying and recording the Abenaki people was a process of commodification, then Automatic represents the opposite,” we concluded. “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.”
With the release of Automatic less than a month away, Obomsawin has now returned with new single, ‘Triage’, complete with a video co-directed with Lokotah Sanborn. Centring on the history of Allen Island in Maine, the location where the Abenaki people first encountered European explorers, both song and film employ an almost folk horror sensibility in order to represent the full haunting weight of imperialist violence, stretching out with a slow, pervasive build. From hushed beginnings, the mood shifts into a hesitant ambient style which plays as mournful over the monochrome images, before shifting into an accelerated, almost panicked style of jazz. The resulting climax is at once poignant and disorientating, and it is no accident the closing section of the video cuts to near silence, just the sound of the breeze in the aftermath.
Automatic will be released on the 16th October via Out Of Your Head Records and you can pre-order it from the Mali Obomsawin Bandcamp page.