Earlier this year, Deerlady were named our Band To Watch. Now, Mali Obomsawin, who is one-half of that duo, has joined forces with Jake Blount for a new collaborative album titled symbiont. The lead single, “My Way’s Cloudy,” is out now and features Joe Rainey.

“We entered a Providence, RI studio to record My Way’s Cloudy on a clear fall day,” the pair explained. They continued:

When we walked outside again, the sky was thick with smoke from Canadian wildfires, carried down on the breeze.

Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling 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. The spiritual “My Way’s Cloudy” was collected from formerly enslaved Black people at the Hampton Institute — mere miles from where Jake’s family originates. Our arrangement features instrumentation from our respective musical traditions and vocals from renowned Red Lake Ojibway singer Joe Rainey. The video was filmed at the Penobscot Nation featuring Selena Neptune-Bear and her two nieces Carmella and Layla Bear.

About the LP, they added:

symbiont is a remix album. The works included here synthesize instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of “hard” science). The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont — and also to points of intense conflict.

This record reflects not only the natural harmonies that exist between our individual and cultural perspectives, but also an arduous process of reconciliation through remix. symbiont is a precisely honed sound mythography born from the same process it champions: the cultivation of a shared future through care, respect, and sacrifice.

Watch the music video for “My Way’s Cloudy” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Prelude” (feat. Jeanne Meserve)
Act I: To Death And Fire
02 “Whatʼs You Gonna Do When The Worldʼs On Fire”
03 “No Hiding Place” (Feat. Sidy Maiga)
04 “My Wayʼs Cloudy” (Feat. Joe Rainey)
05 “Mother”
06 “Stars Begin To Fall” (Feat. Taylor Ho Bynum)
Act II: The Green Road
07 “The Green Road”
08 “Live Humble”
09 “In the Garden”
10 “Come Down Ancients”
11 “Old Indian Hymn”

symbiont is out 9/27 on Smithsonian Folkways.