Mali Obomsawin Gives Every Story Its Own World

The morning after releasing her new album, Automatic, Mali Obomsawin is still thinking about the people who heard it first.

In an Abenaki language group chat, members of her community were discussing words from the record: what they meant, what a translation might leave out, and the voices threaded through the music.

Obomsawin was quietly following along.

“I think sometimes they forget that I'm in there because I never say anything,” she told IND. She watched the responses unfold in real time, unsure what people would think.

“Could have been bad, you know?” she said.

“You never know with experimental music,” she added. “I never expect anyone to hear it or care.”

Instead, people were asking about the language and responding to the voices she had brought into the album. Eventually, she joined the conversation herself.

Released Oct. 16 on Out Of Your Head Records, Automatic brings together Obomsawin’s work as a bassist, vocalist and composer with ancestral recordings returned from Dartmouth College. Across eight tracks, language, improvisation, turntables and electronics become elements of a larger musical world.

It is a record with considerable history behind it. Obomsawin leaves much of that history and language open, careful not to define herself too tightly or hand listeners a field guide.

One description she has encountered in early coverage makes her particularly uncomfortable: the suggestion that Automatic represents a culmination.

“Oh, am I dead now?” she asked. “I’ve been culminated?”

To Obomsawin, the record is something closer to a transition, made during a period of searching, frustration and artistic change.

A human being in transition

For years, Obomsawin’s touring life ran along several tracks at once: Sweet Tooth, Deerlady’s Greatest Hits and work connected to Sugarcane. She was moving constantly, with little time at home.

But those demands were only one part of what she was working through. Automatic took shape slowly, amid music she wanted to honour and new directions she had not yet fully found.

“It took me so long to find it,” she said. “When you make something that is true to who you are, it will tell a bigger story than you are aware of.”

During those months on the road, she was spending time with recordings of her relatives. The tapes were on her laptop, often serving as her connection to home.

“I would listen to them in bed at the hotel, not even really trying to understand them, just to hear the sound,” she wrote in notes later shared with IND.

As she listened, she began to recognize something of her own experience in their confinement. The recordings had been held by an institution, their meaning and impact kept beyond the reach of people who might respond to them. What she related to, she explained, was the feeling of being trapped.

“I just like started to really relate to these characters,” she said.

The question of constraint also informs how she thinks about music. Free jazz, she wrote, “is about fighting off and reinventing constraints of form or other expectation.”

“I think this album for me was reclaiming and setting them loose,” she said.

Yet she does not want reclamation to become another story told only through what was taken.

The resources available today reflect many people’s persistence: Elders, language learners and community members who have kept the language alive since the recordings were made. Obomsawin named Cecile Wawanolette and her family, the people who have spent their lives fighting for repatriation, and Osage curator Jami Powell, whom she credited with helping make access to the tapes possible.

Rather than give loss the last word, she wants to acknowledge what people are making possible now.

“Look at us innovating. Look at us growing. Look at us developing new technologies and doing something that no one has ever seen before,” she said, speaking about what her community has inherited.

Language, without a simple translation

Language, Obomsawin wrote after reading a draft of this article, is the underpinning and connection between all she does across projects.

On Automatic’s title track, an archival voice offers a phrase translated in the recording as “automatic sound.” When the album reached her community’s language group, listeners began discussing what the word means beyond that English rendering.

Obomsawin described how words in her language can work through descriptive verbs and relationships, rather than fitting neatly into the nouns an English speaker might expect.

“We don’t have nouns, really, in our language,” she said.

In her first interview with IND in September, Obomsawin described languages as carrying ways of thinking that cannot always be transferred intact into English or French.

“When I translate a thought that feels like it comes from the culture into English, I feel like violence is done to it,” she said.

Reviewing that passage later, she added a qualification in writing: “At the very least, a great reduction of meaning.”

The album’s title similarly resists a single explanation. It points toward what becomes automatic to us, but it took its time arriving.

“It really took me so long to find the title, for it to find me,” she said.

Obomsawin wants people to keep asking questions, not to be handed a definitive answer. And while concepts matter to her, they cannot substitute for the music itself.

Reflecting on Sweet Tooth, she said a work can mean different things to people at different times. Part of its strength is whether it can last, change and meet the moment in which someone hears it.

That sense of possibility shapes her composing. In September, she described improvisation as the connective tissue of the album, allowing musicians to travel outward while preserving the “spine” that holds the story together.

Tapes, turntables and horns

On Automatic, her upright and electric bass and vocals meet Andrew Broder’s turntables and electronics. Trumpet, cornet, two tenor saxophones and bass clarinet broaden the ensemble’s palette, alongside guitar and drums.

The compositions are built around the archival voices rather than laid over them. Broder processes the recordings on turntables, and the scratching that runs through the album keeps those voices in motion instead of leaving them in the background.

At times, the music gathers intensity before opening out again. And much of its sound comes from beyond the studio: in the archival recordings, trains and flies can be heard around the voices, part of the everyday life of the house where they were made.

On the closing track, listeners also hear audio Obomsawin captured on her iPhone two years ago, of something happening in her community’s church during powwow.

These sounds are not simply illustrations of the album’s ideas. They are part of the musical language through which Obomsawin gives each composition its own character.

For a record that draws on free improvisation, Automatic is carefully structured, and it moves from track to track like one long story. Heard from start to finish, it is a rich listening experience, and one that does not come along often.

Anger and reverie

There is anger in Automatic, and Obomsawin does not conceal it.

While making the record, she was thinking about events in Palestine, intensifying immigration enforcement by ICE in the United States, and discussions of residential schools.

To Obomsawin, these concerns are connected by the history and continuing structures of colonialism and imperialism. In a voice note sent after the interview, she said she sees contemporary tactics of state violence as reproducing methods “tested on us first” before they were “exported to the rest of the world as part of American imperialism.”

But the record’s emotional language extends beyond anger.

Obomsawin spoke about grief, solidarity and the possibility of imagining a world beyond the political structures of the present.

“On this record, there is this, the anger and the fighting and there's also the reverie, I hope.” Reverie, she explained, is a kind of dreaming.

She wondered what the world might look like 250 years from now. “I think we’re closer to an international revolution against western imperialism than we realize, and I see Indigenous sovereignty globally as a very possible future,” she wrote in her review notes.

To explain the scale of change, she offered a metaphor: walk 40 miles into the woods, and you must walk 40 miles to get back out.

“I think Automatic is like a reflection of right now. I don't think that this is the future,” she said.

The record belongs to the present, with all its anger and uncertainty.

More than one musical world

Obomsawin has little patience for attempts to fit her artistry into a single space.

Her creative life also includes Deerlady, an indie rock project, alongside poetry, songwriting, guitar and other musical pursuits. She spoke about these not as competing definitions of herself, but as different ways of giving a story what it needs.

Deerlady can begin with poetry and find the musical context to support it. Automatic can begin with sound and build a story around it. Different projects ask different things of her, but none is outside the picture.

“That's still me too, as an artist,” she said.

“I don't know exactly how it's all related other than that it's all me.”

No single album, collaboration or musical category could offer a complete account of her as an artist.

“The best way to tell a story is to give it its own world,” she said.

That philosophy gives Obomsawin room to work without treating any record, band or genre as the final definition of her artistic life.

Just listen

After two conversations with IND, Obomsawin has offered many possible ways into Automatic: ancestral voices, language, composition, political anger, musical freedom and the circumstances of its creation.

But when asked what she ultimately wants from the people who hear it, her answer is considerably simpler.

“I want people to put it on. Lay down, on the floor.”

Turn off the phone, she suggested, and listen to the whole record. Listen more than once, or try it in reverse order.

For her, the album is not designed to be reduced to individual singles or a convenient explanation. It is a complete musical experience, something listeners can enter on their own terms.

“Just listen to the story,” she said.

And then, she added, move on with your life.