Mali Obomsawin Announces New Album Automatic

Mali Obomsawin has announced her second solo album, Automatic, alongside the release of its frenetic title track — a record that turns archival Abenaki voices into a radical, living form of musical expression.

The Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer, and citizen of the Abenaki First Nation’s Odanak community in Quebec, will release Automatic on 16 October via Out Of Your Head Records. The eight-track album follows Obomsawin’s critically acclaimed 2022 debut Sweet Tooth and was shaped by what she describes as a “disorienting and emotional journey” following the intense touring and attention that surrounded the record.

At the heart of Automatic is a remarkable archive. During the rollout of Sweet Tooth, Odanak received hundreds of hours of mid-20th-century recordings of the Abenaki language that had previously been held exclusively at Dartmouth College, where Obomsawin studied.

That discovery fundamentally changed the direction of the new record. “Behind Automatic is a deep awareness about institutions’ predatory relationship with Native material,” Obomsawin says. “I wanted to make a record that institutions couldn’t own.”

The title track brings that idea sharply into focus, pairing Obomsawin’s voice with archival recordings of her great-grand relative, Malian. Working alongside turntablist Andrew Broder, she transforms the crackle and imperfections of the decades-old reel-to-reel recordings into part of the music itself.

Rather than treating the recordings as historical artefacts, Obomsawin uses them as living material. “The turntable is an instrument that explores time and temporality and is able to give a form of agency to the ancestors in the recordings,” she explains.

Across Automatic, Obomsawin explores maximalism, war and Indigenous identity through the voices of the Odanak people themselves. She is joined by collaborators including cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, Zack and Adam O’Farrill, and guitarist Magdalena Abrego, her collaborator in Stereogum Band To Watch Deerlady.

The album continues a practice that has become central to Obomsawin’s wider work, which has included composing the score for the Academy Award-nominated documentary Sugarcane and participating in ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future, an unsanctioned exhibition of Native artists at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With Automatic, Obomsawin goes further still, reclaiming traditional Abenaki language and musical traditions not as objects for outside study, but as a basis for contemporary improvisation and composition.

It is a record concerned with who gets to control history — and what happens when those whose stories have been archived take the material back and make it their own.

Automatic arrives 16 October via Out Of Your Head Records.

1. “Nawa”

2. “Automatic”

3. “Triage”

4. “O’temin”

5. “Mou, qyand j’y suis”

6. “Malian”

7. “Kohua II”

8. “Venez”