Obomsawin, Mali - Automatic CD
SKU
OOYH 051
Mali Obomsawin - upright and electric bass, vocals
Andrew Broder - turntables, electronics
Adam O'Farrill - trumpet
Taylor Ho Bynum - cornet
Allison Burik - bass clarinet
Yuma Uesaka - tenor saxophone
Noah Campbell - tenor saxophone
Magdalena Abrego - electric guitar
Zack O'Farrill - drums
“During the rollout of her debut, Odanak received hundreds of hours of mid-twentieth-century ethnological recordings of the Abenaki language, previously held exclusively at Dartmouth College, Obomsawin’s alma mater. She had drawn on some of these recordings for Sweet Tooth, but the unprecedented scale of access transformed her process entirely. “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.”
To get there, she worked closely with turntablist Andrew Broder to process and preserve the untidy reality of those source materials — decades-old, crackling reel-to-reel recordings of her ancestors’ voices. “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.
Rather than treat her ancestors’ voices as ethnological material for outside consumption, Automatic reclaims traditional Abenaki language and music traditions as living improvisational composition, refusing to let institutions commodify what belongs to her people.” - Klof
- LabelOut Of Your Head
- UPC885288118438