Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer and citizen of the Abenaki First Nation’s Odanak community in Quebec, Mali Obomsawin releases her second solo album, Automatic.
From first listen, Automatic pulls you in with the sound of the reel, moving between experimental jazz, electronics and improvisation. Obomsawin, who plays upright and electric bass alongside vocals, is joined by a group of collaborators, including Andrew Broder on turntables and electronics, Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet, Allison Burik on bass clarinet, Yuma Uesaka and Noah Campbell on tenor saxophone, Magdalena Abrego on electric guitar, and Zack O’Farrill on drums.
A significant source of inspiration came from the recovery of mid-20th-century reel-to-reel recordings of the Abenaki language by the Odanak community. Dartmouth College’s release of the ethnological recordings to Odanak became an important starting point for Automatic.
Another layer of inspiration came from Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco’s 24-panel fresco mural, The Epic of American Civilization, painted in the early 1930s. During her time as a student at Dartmouth, Obomsawin spent hours in the basement of Baker Library, where the mural wraps around the walls. Depicting the grotesque scenes of Euro-American conquest, the panels eventually reduce all bodies to skeletons wearing academic robes and handing out diplomas.
This absurdist morbidity is embedded throughout Automatic, where Obomsawin shifts between confrontational compositions and moments of softness. Obomsawin reflects: “I feel like the sort of threshold to the other side is so thin. We feel close to it because we have nothing to hide from ourselves. When I think of the role of the ancestral voices on the record, they are just peeking through that threshold.”
Automatic is full of haunting textures and flashes of the ethereal, with ancestral voices threaded together with Obomsawin’s own as history and the surreal meet.
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