Jake Blount

Jake Blount (pronounced: blunt) is an award-winning interpreter of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician, Blount has charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course on his pilgrimage through sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. This “genrequeer” approach to the traditions has earned his music a place in the very same archives from which he extracts his repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories and linear time, Blount fashions an “Afrofuturist folklore” that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny. symbiont, Jake Blount’s upcoming album collaboration with Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation), is a dialogue with the ancient and the anterior. Questions of future or present tense swirl in the language of shape-note hymns, spirituals, late 17th century Caribbean banjo tunes, sequenced beats and synthesized drones, screaming electric guitars, and more. “Climate change’s many consequences travel like smoke, imperiling bodies and communities as surely as they shroud the sky,” they write. “The music of symbiont is an attempt to join our peoples in sound and movement as we stave off death together.”