*announcing*
IARC0039

Damon Locks
Black Monument Ensemble

NOW

Digital album out April 9th
LP/CD in stores July 9th

preview & pre-order
via our Bandcamp page TODAY

An exciting day today... Mercury is no longer in retrograde AND we have the privilege of announcing our first new release of 2021, which is: brand new music by Damon Locks and his Black Monument Ensemble. A followup to their iconic 2019 debut Where Future Unfolds, it's an album for these times appropriately titled NOW.

NOW (FOREVER MOMENTARY SPACE)

On any/all digi platforms today you can check out the album's lead single in audio form OR audiovisual form, i.e. an animated video by Rob Shaw. The song is called "Now (Forever Momentary Space)," and according to Locks it was "inspired by a short story by writer Cadwell Turnbull called ‘Jump.’ The story is about a couple who experience something seemingly impossible and the lengths one of them would go to control that. It ultimately is an investigation in acceptance and imagining what is possible and taking a leap towards it. ‘Now (Forever Momentary Space)’ is about the moment outside of the timeline where everything is possible. That moment is Now.”

The recording heavily features fiery clarinet from the indestructible Angel Bat Dawid underneath a now-6-person chorus of BME singers. Listen deeper and you'll hear muted brass from the great Ben LaMar Gay and a real-life symphony of summer cicadas accompanying the ensemble. Shaw's video features Locks's animations and actual footage from the outdoor recording session shot by Brian Ashby.

Watch & Listen to "Now (Forever Momentary Space)"

BLACK MONUMENT ENSEMBLE

Originally conceived as a medium for Chicago-based multi-media artist/activist Damon Locks’s sample-based sound collage work, Black Monument Ensemble (BME) has evolved from a solo mission into a vibrant collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers making work with common goals of joy, compassion, and intention. Galvanized by Locks’s conceptualizing, poeticizing, and guiding vision, the contributors come from all facets of the diverse wellspring of Black artistic excellence in Chicago, bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to uplifting, anthemic, and highly animated musical performance.

BME is a genuinely multi-generational collective; ages of the members range from 9 to 52 years old. In addition to Locks, current and consistent BME members include: instrumentalists Angel Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, Dana Hall, and Arif Smith; singers Phillip Armstrong, Monique Golding, Rayna Golding, Tramaine Parker, Richie Parks, Erica Rene, and Eric Tre’von; and dancers Raven Lewis, Cheyenne Spencer, Mary Thomas, Bryonna Young, Tiarra Young, and Keisha Janae.

Locks has a stated interest in work that explores “The Black Nod” which, as he explains, is “an unspoken acknowledgment that happens often out in the world – a sort of ‘I see you’ moment exchanged between Black people.” His work with BME attempts to do the same. Fronted by a jubilant choir, the ensemble embraces a kind of civically engaged, artistic approach to activism originally heard in the 1960s from bands like the Voices of East Harlem and on albums like Max Roach’s We Insist; or originally seen in the photography of Kwame Brathwaite and the art of Emory Douglas. Merging influence from the subsequent half-century of artistic & technological evolution, Locks employs a cyber-punk palette of disparate implements (including beatbox, boombox, telephone, and megaphone) to make narrative compositions of mined sound, beats & archival speech (a la Madlib or Supa K) which are brought to life by the ensemble in electric, improvisational performance. It’s a truly multi-dimensional sound that spans mediums, genres, and generations; past, present, & future.

BME’s debut album Where Future Unfolds was recorded live in Chicago at the Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory and released in 2019 by International Anthem. The recording documented the first time that the project was presented in a fully expressed format, where Locks debuted the BME large ensemble and turned his poetry, collages & compositions into a soaring experiential performance. The album was received with glowing praise, landing at #3 on Bandcamp’s “Best Albums of the Year,” #25 on WIRE Magazine’s “Best Albums of 2019,” and being repeatedly dubbed “The Best Album of 2019” by BBC/Worldwide radio titan Gilles Peterson.

Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble’s new album NOW was created in the final throes of Summer 2020, following months of pandemic-induced fear & isolation, the explosion of social unrest, struggle & violence in the streets, and as the certain presence of a new reality had fully settled in.

Set up safely in the garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, the music was recorded in only a few takes, capturing the first times members of BME had ever played or sang the tunes. For Locks, the impetus was more about getting together to commune and make art than it was about producing an album. In his words:

“It was about offering a new thought. It was about resisting the darkness. It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, ‘Since the future has unfolded and taken a new and dangerous shape... what happens NOW?’”

Preview & Pre-order
Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble
<<< NOW >>>

(( photo by Kristie Kahns ))) — (( photo by **Kristie Kahns** )))

DAMON LOCKS

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist, musician, and deejay. Known for decades of varied projects in Chicago’s underground music & art scenes, Locks’ CV starts in the late 1980s with the band Trenchmouth, and is highlighted by work with The Eternals (co-led by Trenchmouth bandmate Wayne Montana), Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, collaborations with Nicole Mitchell, Ben LaMar Gay, and many others.

In recent years Locks has traversed almost every media discipline… including sound/animation work using unheard Sun Ra recordings from Experimental Sound Studio’s archive (with Terri Kapsalis, Wayne Montana, and Rob Shaw); various collaborations with contemporary dancers & choreographers including Onye Ozuzu, Ayesha Jaco (of Move Me Soul), and Anna Martine Whitehead (on presentations & workshops with the Detroit Justice Center); participating in artist residencies at The New Quorum in New Orleans (alongside Nicole Mitchell, Lisa E Harris, Wadada Leo Smith, and others); teaching work with incarcerated artists for the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville maximum security prison; and producing cover art for dozens of albums, including several International Anthem releases by Makaya McCraven, Hear In Now, Irreversible Entanglements, and more.

*Deluxe Vinyl Package*

SHADES of NIGHT in GOLD color vinyl

The album art for NOW is another smash hit by Damon Locks, a true master of the medium. The LP version also features a world premiere of our IARC obi strip being banded around the Eastside of the jacket, plus a large 17" x 22" broadsheet insert (with liner notes, photos, and a fold-out illustration by Locks), and our dome patterned inner-sleeve.

And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of Shades of Night in Gold color vinyl.

Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!

Distribution via RedEye for
US, Canada, North & South America

This album will also be available on Classic Black Vinyl (same specs as above, sans color vinyl) and on Compact Disc (in a deluxe 4-panel digipack).

The retail street date for the LP and CD editions of Force Majeure is December 4th, 2020.

Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!

Distribution via K7 for
Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, and ROW

This album will be distributed by our friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, Asia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.

Again, the retail street date for the LP and CD editions of Force Majeure is December 4th, 2020.

If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!