Jake Blount is coming over for the annual Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival
Mon 30 Jun 2025Award winning artists Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin released a new radical, collaborative album "Symbiont". An album in two acts, symbiont is a dialogue with the ancient and anterior. The listener is met with rising tidewaters, massive droughts, and the appearance of an iconoclastic uprising amidst the world’s indifference. Questions of future or present tense swirl as the duo unspools the intertwined threads of racial and climate justice. The duo says, “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.”
In defiance of genre, revisionist histories and linear time, Jake and Mali have made an Indigenous and Afrofuturist Folklore that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny. The duo employed shape-note hymns, spirituals, Caribbean banjo tunes from the late 17th century, sequenced beats and synthesized drones, screaming electric guitars, and more to create the album. Their “genrequeer” approach to their respective traditions has earned them a place in some of the same archives from which they pulled repertoire for symbiont.
Jake Blount has announced coming over for the annual Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival: