With the recent reveal of her forthcoming second album, Automatic, NYC-based avant-garde jazz musician Mali Obomsawin shared that the project was at least in part a response to the uneasiness she felt with the level of unexpected attention her 2022 debut received. Yet the new record’s eeriness can also be chalked up to an additional factor, which Obomsawin—a member of Quebec’s Abenaki First Nation—explained as “a deep awareness about institutions’ predatory relationship with Native material.” Hence, Automatic heavily relies on ethnological recordings sourced from Dartmouth College. “I wanted to make a record that institutions couldn’t own.”
Following the release of the title track last month, the artist returns today with the droning, seven-and-a-half-minute “Triage,” a sinister soundtrack to the colonial history of Maine’s Allen Island. To illustrate the source of the song’s tension, she’s also sharing a black-and-white music video she co-directed with Lokotah Sanborn that, like the song itself, is an ambient take on folk-horror. Regarding the score she did for Sanborn’s short documentary about the video’s location that was also released today, she explained of the island that it was “a site of first contact between Abenaki people and European explorers. In 1605, Captain George Weymouth’s crew kidnapped five Abenaki men and trafficked them across the Atlantic. The island was later bought and terraformed by painter Andrew Wyeth and his wife Betsy.”
Check out the song and video below (of both, Obomsawin cryptically shares that “It is heard before it is seen”), and pre-order Automatic here.
