Mali Obomsawin has been blurring musical and institutional boundaries for years. A bassist, composer and singer from the Abenaki community of Odanak, she has built a sound where avant-garde jazz, folk, improvisation, noise and Indigenous tradition collide in ways that feel entirely her own.
Automatic gets straight to it. A deep, dry, repetitive riff locks into place with an almost mechanical insistence, somewhere between no wave and punk-funk. From there, vocals, drums, bass and increasingly feral brass pile in until the whole thing threatens to come apart at the seams. It never quite does. Even at its most chaotic, there’s a clear sense that Obomsawin knows exactly how far she wants to push it.
That tension runs deeper than the sound itself. The track features archival recordings of Malian, one of Obomsawin’s ancestors, drawn from Abenaki ethnological recordings that remained in institutional custody for decades. Working with turntablist Andrew Broder, she doesn’t clean them up or smooth away the cracks and age.
“The turntable is an instrument that explores time and temporality and is able to give a form of agency to the ancestors in the recordings”. Mali Obomsawin.
That idea sits right at the heart of the track. These voices aren’t treated like relics or historical decoration; they’re pulled back into something living, rough-edged and constantly shifting. Tradition isn’t kept at a respectful distance. It enters the present, unsettles it and changes the shape of what’s happening around it.
Automatic is intense, physical and brilliantly restless. More importantly, it feels like the work of an artist with something genuinely interesting to say about memory, ownership and freedom. As a first taste of her upcoming album of the same name, it makes that record very hard to ignore.
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