Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin Join Forces for Social Justice-Centered Album ‘symbiont’

symbiont, the new collaborative album from Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin, isn’t going to sound like anything you’ve heard before.

The album, coming Sept. 27 on Smithsonian Folkways, contends with the past, present, and future through the lens of racial and climate justice, tapping into ancient forms of storytelling and cultural transmission with a very modern musical twist: the remix.

“The works included here synthesize instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of ‘hard’ science),” Blount and Obomsawin explain in today’s press release announcing the album. “The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont — and also to points of intense conflict.”

Blount’s expertise in Black folk music and Obomsawin’s roots in Indigenous traditions as well as free jazz and experimental music combine for an album in two acts: The first is titled “To Death and Fire,” and the second “The Green Road.”

“Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky,” the duo says of the music’s message. “The music of symbiont is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”

The album’s first single, “My Way’s Cloudy,” features Red Lake Ojibwe singer Joe Rainey, with lyrics collected from formerly enslaved people at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, near where Blount’s family comes from. The video, filmed in the Penobscot Nation, shows dancers Selena Neptune-Bear and her nieces Carmella and Layla Bear.

“We entered a Providence, RI studio to record ‘My Way’s Cloudy’ on a clear fall day,” Blount and Obomsawin note in the video’s description. “When we walked outside again, the sky was thick with smoke from Canadian wildfires, carried down on the breeze.”

Blount’s most recent solo album is 2022’s The New Faith (ND story), and he’s been releasing singles this year with New Dangerfield, a supergroup also including Kaia Kater, Tray Wellington, and Nelson Williams. Obomsawin released music earlier this year with Deerlady, her shoegaze project with guitarist Magdalena Abrego, and was formerly a member of the folk trio Lula Wiles. Her debut solo album, Sweet Tooth (ND review), was released in 2022.

Blount and Obomsawin will tour together this fall in New England and the West Coast, and will appear at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in November.

Here’s the track list for symbiont:

1. Prelude (feat. Jeanne Meserve)

Act I: To Death and Fire
2. Whatʼs You Gonna Do When the Worldʼs on Fire
3. No Hiding Place (feat. Sidy Maiga)
4. My Wayʼs Cloudy (feat. Joe Rainey)
5. Mother
6. Stars Begin to Fall (feat. Taylor Ho Bynum)

Act II: The Green Road
7. The Green Road
8. Live Humble
9. In the Garden
10. Come Down Ancients
11. Old Indian Hymn