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Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin’s Symbiont is a magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth.
Surely, only those who live with their heads under an inflatable doughnut can exist in the world today, oblivious to the climate crisis. It is a daily news story; in only the past few days, I have read stories of the world vibrating for nine days due to climate-changing landslides and an unprecedented flood disaster in Poland. The experience in England these past few years has been disorientating in the sense that the seasons are no longer running in quite the same dependably recognisable way they used to. Neil Young once correctly told us, “just singing a song won’t change the world,” but I would argue that it remains the job of the arts to articulate our emotional responses to changing times, to stimulate our awareness of what is going on as after all, surely being alert enough to just think about these things a bit more cannot be a regressive step? So, with that in mind, we need to turn our thoughts towards this provocative new album-length collaboration between Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin.
‘Symbiont’ is presented as an album with two distinct acts, playing out as a dialogue between the ancient and the anterior. We are thrown knee-deep into the rolling waves of an audio representation of a world submitting to the reality of rising tides and unparalleled droughts as the wider populace go about their daily lives shrugging in indifference. It gets right to where the fight is right now, battling the avalanche of climate deniers as they come tumbling down the stairs hell-bent on halting humanity’s battle for survival. On this, Jake and Mali comment, “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperilling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky. The music of ‘Symbiont’ is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”
Now I am aware that this all rather suggests that this record could be heavy going. Nothing could be further from the truth; ‘Symbiont’ is a swirling melting pot of a creation. It has peaks and valleys, threading an audio weave throughout eleven pieces that never sit still or drag. Both artists realise an effortless dexterity of styles, moods and motions. We begin with a news bulletin detailing climate disaster in real-time before science fiction referencing airwave tremors break up the broadcast as other voices invade, speaking of the arrival of Symbiots pushing an “Earth first” policy. This paves the way for the first in a multitude of highlights with the dramatic, soulfully robotic What’s You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire. My Way’s Cloudy has a persuasive insistence and a production that sees Jake operating a synthesiser via an aloe barbadensis plant. Live Humble is underpinned by a hypnotic, eastern-flavoured repetition, but it flies boundlessly in just over four minutes, hitting a crescendo of savage electric guitar that threatens to splinter all around. In The Garden may have the form of an old spiritual, but it is constantly invaded with stabs of white noise and cranking gears as if to remind us that nature’s perilous reality is not going to simply drift away.
Embedded in the folk tradition is the process of evolution and re-interpretation, bringing aged material into a new era with fresh perspectives. This is a process that Jake and Mali honour, but they do so without a hint of previous formulas. It is no surprise to learn that they refer to the process as “remixing” for the modernist approach, with tasteful factions of electronica and found sound all carefully applied and making for a cutting-edge experience; this is music that wipes your face and re-awakes the senses. There is nothing so predictable as a linear foundation either; everything washes and splashes between the present, the past, and a future that remains wide open, where the apocalyptic and the utopian appear equally possible. This is a daring album in which the apparently incompatible make for perfect bedfellows. Blount’s background in pioneering Black folk music interpretation and Afrofuturism inspire and are inspired by the free jazz experimentalism from which Obomsawin has risen. You cannot really nail down exactly what this magical fusion of natural beauty, fragility, turbulence and ever-evolving motion really is, let alone where it came from and how it works so wonderfully well. It is awe-inspiring, a ball of chance and wonder, much like the planet Earth itself when you come to think of it.
Symbiont (27th September 2024) Smithsonian Folkways
Pre-Order: https://orcd.co/jake-blount-and-mali-obomsawin
