With major hurricanes, floods and wildfires dominating news cycles, seemingly year-round, scientists and experts widely agree we are currently facing the impacts of climate change.
New England musicians Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin are processing this reality through the recently released album, symbiont. It references their African American and Indigenous musical and political traditions, and the duo is performing at Higher Ground in South Burlington this Friday.
Blount spoke with Vermont Public's Mary Williams Engisch to share more about the album and upcoming performance. This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary Williams Engisch: Mali Obomsawin is a citizen of Odanak First Nation. Her 2022 debut album, Sweet Tooth, featured both old and new stories from her Abenaki community. And Jake, you've performed at Carnegie Hall and done an NPR Tiny Desk concert. You're a Ph.D. student of musicology, ethnomusicology, at Brown University. Your music has been described as Afrofuturist folklore.
So, you and Mali have these distinct musical histories and traditions. How did you find the intersections between those musical worlds?
Jake Blount: I think kind of the intersection came first. I met Mali back when she was touring with the band Lula Wiles, many years ago. You know, we met each other, kind of as part of that folk scene a long time ago, and we wound up kind of just working together in a few different formats. She played bass on my last album, The New Faith. We toured together out West, and just decided to give making something together a shot.
Mary Williams Engisch: And for this new album, symbiont, I understand, you and Mali were lyrically and musically inspired by collections of Black and Indigenous folk songs. Take me into you sitting there and combing through that music. What did that look like? What did that sound like?
Jake Blount: All of those songs are traditional songs. We didn't write any of them. Some of them, we rewrote a little bit, just substituting words here or there to make it make sense with the album concept or maybe match messages we were trying to send.
We did a lot of working with print collections for this one, which is a new thing for me. Historically, when I've worked with archival materials like that, it's been sound archives. So I've gone back and listened to recordings and learned songs off of that.
We wound up working a lot out of a collection called, "Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro," that was made at the Hampton Institute, which is just up the road from where my family is from and has been from for a long, long time. We wound up working a lot with some text from Thomas Commuck, who was the first-known published Indigenous composer here in what is now the United States — part of the Brothertown Nation at the time his works were published, but born into the Narragansett tribe here in Rhode Island, which is now Rhode Island.
It's an interesting process, because you go find your source, right, find these collections, and then you have to learn the melody of the song and decide whether that really works, or whether you need to reharmonize it in some way. Or, you know, if just putting a beat behind it will make it more interesting. But we wound up in a place that felt really good
Mary Williams Engisch: Your last individual project imagined a future world sort of roiling with climate disaster and with civil unrest. And, symbiont also dives into the issue of climate change. How does revisiting ancestral music practices and lessons kind of help us understand and maybe try to deal with climate change?
Jake Blount: This has been a really fun thing for us to talk about, in that, I think historically, Black people and Indigenous people have thought of Futurism in very different ways.
Speaking for myself, this music, these traditions that are passed down from the time in history that we're talking about, come from people who had just survived an apocalypse, right? Like, their world had just been destroyed.
We think about the massive waves of disease that happened on this continent. We think about the dispossession of land and the destruction of full civilizations that happened here, about the kidnapping of so many people from Africa that their whole cultures and civilizations wound up collapsing, of course, not all of them, but some of them did. Bringing all of those people here, stripped of language, of religion, of tradition, of kinship. There's a destruction that happened that these songs were created, I think, in both communities as a way of coping with or finding a way out of.
And, our idea was to look at those and say, "OK, there's a different destruction happening now." And particularly because we're planting this in an archive, right? Because this is coming out on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It goes into the Smithsonian archive as we make it.
So a big part of our consideration was, "OK, how are we making this available to future generations who are going through these same archives that we just got all this stuff out of?" We're making an entry here for future people to look at. How are they going to get to it? And what do we want to tell them? So we really wanted to kind of take out lessons that we felt like were already present in those songs and let them speak to a new moment.
Mary Williams Engisch: Did I see in the liner notes that you used plants to make certain sounds on the album? Did I read that correctly?
Jake Blount: Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of synthesized sounds on this record, and many of them were made by plants. I have a Eurorack synthesizer module, which allows me to connect some sensors that look almost like EKG pads or something to the leaves of a plant, and it measures the bioelectric impulses being sent across the leaf or the skin or whatever you attach it to, and converts those into control voltage for the synthesizers.
Mary Williams Engisch: Lastly, Jake, what can Vermonters expect at your performance on Friday? How does all of this translate to like, a live setting?
Jake Blount: It's been really dynamic. One of the things that we've been excited about each night is just because of the sounds that it's made out of, and it takes a very different form in each room. You know, expect some some rich and unexpected sounds. You know, we're going to be surprised. We're all on the same ride in that room, and we're excited to share in it with everybody.
Mary Williams Engisch: Blount and Mali Obomsawin are performing at Higher Ground in South Burlington on Friday.
Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message.
