ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘symbiont,’ Blount and Obomsawin Remix the Ancestors

Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) have worked nothing less than a miracle on symbiont, out Friday on Smithsonian Folkways. The album continues the work of Blount’s Afro-futurist climate change epic The New Faith (2022) and Obomsawin’s portentous assertion of Indigenous music’s place on Sweet Tooth (2022). symbiont may best be considered as presentist and climate pessimist. Its collaborators foreground the elements of traditional African American and Indigenous music to confront the sense that civilization could end if we continue to inhabit the rapacious settler-colonial system that has wreaked havoc upon us all.

symbiont begins with a framing narrative of climate disaster and otherworldly bodies – the ancestors, ancients, or something else – intervening in our daily life and gaining followers (perhaps a prequel to The New Faith). But the reality is chilling enough, and the words of the ancestors in this music only helps to heighten the stakes.

On “My Way’s Cloudy,” Obomsawin lays down the melody with an ominous pace, her bass rumbling as guitars, synths, and the arrhythmic tic of – yes – an aloe plant connected to a synthesizer, weave a vast tapestry of wrath. The plant, by the way, gets credit on a number of songs.

Ojibwe singer Joe Rainey’s vocals, the gospel melody, the replacement of the word “angels” with “ancients” and the hip-hop-inspired loops present, perhaps, the clearest example of the album’s thesis: When these old songs are stripped of their colonial trappings, they hold a vast power that could only be hinted at sidelong under repressive enslaving and missionary regimes.

“Stars Begin to Fall” illustrates the retribution we have coming to us with a chilling optimism. The harmonies and jaunty synth line transform this gospel song into an intriguing soundscape, forcing us to tune back into lyrics we may have become used to on more traditional compositions. While Obomsawin and Blount refer to symbiont as a “remix” album, one could argue the pair are performing a resurrection – forcing us to lend a new ear to traditional music that is often trapped in amber with an unquestioning devotion to the past.

As symbiont concludes with “Come Down Ancients” and “Old Indian Hymn” (which now invokes “The Mother,” rather than “The Father”), the listener is led to see the end of what we know does not have to be a catastrophe. In fact, the ancestors had the wisdom we needed all along, trapped in dusty hymnals and archives that we ignored as we’ve lived under the assumption that Black and Indigenous wisdom has been erased.

On this album, Blount and Obomsawin show us that, with patience, devotion, and creativity, these teachings are as vital as ever – and as life-giving.

Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin’s symbiont releases Sep. 27 on Smithsonian Folkways.