Award winning artists Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin announce a new radical, collaborative album symbiont, out September 27th via Smithsonian Folkways, and share the lead single/video “My Way’s Cloudy (feat. Joe Rainey).” An album in two acts, symbiont is a dialogue with the ancient and anterior. The listener is met with rising tidewaters, massive droughts, and the appearance of an iconoclastic uprising amidst the world’s indifference. Questions of future or present tense swirl as the duo unspools the intertwined threads of racial and climate justice. The duo says, “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky. The music of symbiont is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”
Best Music of 2024 - Rolling Stone
In defiance of genre, revisionist histories and linear time, Jake and Mali have made an Indigenous and Afrofuturist folklore that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny. The duo employed shape-note hymns, spirituals, Caribbean banjo tunes from the late 17th century, sequenced beats and synthesized drones, screaming electric guitars, and more to create the album. Their “genrequeer” approach to their respective traditions has earned them a place in some of the same archives from which they pulled repertoire for symbiont.
10 Best Folk Albums of 2024 - The Guardian
Folk musicians tend to use terms like “the folk process” or “oral tradition” to describe the way songs change, hybridize and diverge into new works as they pass from one practitioner to the next. But the word most widely used today is one that folk musicians with nostalgic, self-conscious aspirations to rurality have generally shied away from: remix. Jake and Mali embrace the term and concept with symbiont. They explain, “symbiont is a remix album. 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). The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont—and also to points of intense conflict.”
Mali and Jake continue, “This record reflects not only the natural harmonies that exist between our individual and cultural perspectives, but also an arduous process of reconciliation through remix. symbiont is a precisely honed sound mythography born from the same process it champions: the cultivation of a shared future through care, respect, and sacrifice.”