Mali Obomsawin Reckons With Art, Identity, and Ownership on “Automatic”
Brooklyn-based bassist and singer Mali Obomsawin has announced that her second solo album, Automatic, will be out on October 16th via Out Of Your Head Records. The follow-up to 2022’s Sweet Tooth deals with the “disorienting and emotional journey” from her debut that forced her to reckon with her place in the music industry as a genre-defying artist.
Obomsawin is a citizen of the Abenaki First Nation’s Odanak community in Quebec, Canada. In the years since Sweet Tooth, she gained access to hundreds of hours of mid-1900s ethnological recordings of the Abenaki language, which were previously held exclusively at Dartmouth College. The experience helped shape what would become Automatic.
“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.”
Obomsawin has shared the title track, which encapsulates the project through her exploratory bass playing and singing, as well as archival recordings of her great-grand relative, Malian.
Automatic is open to pre-orders on CD, vinyl and as a digital download (Apple Music, and Amazon Music).
In his time with No Treble, Kevin has met hundreds of amazing bassists and interviewed icons like Jack Casady, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Marcus Miller, and more. He's a gigging bassist performing jazz in Northern Virginia and bluegrass with The Plate Scrapers up and down the East Coast. Kevin appreciates all genres of music, from R&B to metal and everything in between. Connect with Kevin on Facebook and check his performance schedule on his website.
