OUT NOW on all digital music platforms: Damon Locks's LIST OF DEMANDS
Damon Locks
List of Demands
** OUT NOW **
On all music platforms
Today Damon Locks – the Chicago-based visual artist, educator, musician, deejay, and vocalist who is known as the voice of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, former frontman of legendary punk band Trenchmouth, and leader of latter day liberation music collective Black Monument Ensemble – releases his debut solo album List of Demands on all digital streaming platforms.
"A dense, tour-de-force collection of improvisational jazz and punk poetry that enhances his music legacy."
- Chicago Tribune
“The album’s quickly shifting sounds and spoken words alternately disturb and entrance, suggesting foreboding and hope in equal measure."
- Wall Street Journal
“Both archival and of the present — engrossing and energizing, to be blasted from every boombox.”
- AllMusic
“A fascinating mind…this record really captures a lot of what he’s most passionate about.”
- NPR Music
“An engaging and kaleidoscopic mix of jazz, sampling, poetry, and a DIY/punk ethos, it’s the sort of album that can’t easily be represented by a single track.”
- WNYC Soundcheck
“A rich tapestry of sound that spans experimental composition and sample-based production…resulting in a powerful artistic statement.”
- HYFIN (Radio Milwaukee)
“Despite the barrage of samples employed throughout the album, his voice rides comfortably in the pockets of groove.”
- I Care If You Listen
"... a project operating at several high-frequency interlocking bandwidths."
- 48Hilll
“Man wird sich diesen gewaltigen Sound- und Poesie-Collagen langsam und Stück für Stück nähern müssen, so viel steckt in ihnen.”
- musicexpress
“The samples of vintage soul, reggae and movie dialogue surround Locks with desperate, defiant, erudite and joyous black voices. His own voice cuts through like a radio announcer’s, beaming commentary out of the chaos.”
- MAGNET
“Le sample, lui, est le pilier central des instrus. L’outil principal du hip-hop sert de caisse de résonance à ses poésies abstraites, futuristes et engagées…sa liste de revendications.”
- Le Grigri
"...świetnie, tworząc zniuansowane dzieło, z bogatym kontekstem i dbałością o spójność wizji."
- Nowa Muzyka
Los Angeles Release Show
Presented by our dear friends at Living Earth, Locks will perform List of Demands at the Philosophical Research Society on February 26th. This will be Damon's first ever solo performance in Los Angeles!
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
7:30 PM 9:30 PM
Philosophical Research Society
(in the lecture room)
3910 Los Feliz Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA
Chicago Release Show
On March 6, presented by International Anthem & Lumpen Radio, Locks will perform List of Demands LIVE at Co-Prosperity in Chicago. It will be a special Thursday night LIVE broadcast of Locks's regular Lumpen Radio program LISTENING DEVICE, available on 105.5 FM Chicago (and online via lumpenradio.com), as well as in-person at Co-Prosperity. Opening DJ set by Ntone Edjabe of Pan African Space Station.
Thursday, March 6th, 2025
Doors 7:30PM, Performance & broadcast 8-10PM
Co-Prosperity
3219 S Morgan St
Chicago, IL
List of Demands marks Locks’s first foray into creating an entire album based off of his poetry and texts; but the signature collage work heard in his recent New Future City Radio and ongoing Black Monument Ensemble output is distinctly present in this new 12-song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments.
The album’s sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal participation in the culture. Locks’ decades-long resume connects the dots between experimental improvisation, sample based hip hop, punk, and poetry – each done at the highest level and with a list of collaborators that could spin the head of even the most jaded listener. With his sheer presence as a communal hub himself, Locks has repeatedly demonstrated his capacity to jump-start an entire personality spectrum into action. With List of Demands he does just that, again, projecting an ecstatic positivity via his nuanced grasp of reality, and lucidly articulating the ever-evasive concept of what could be.
The album was set in motion when Locks was asked by Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) to present a new sound piece inside an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. After the show, ESS’s Alex Inglizian encouraged Locks to expand upon and record the music, and volunteered to engineer the sessions. Locks used the opportunity to invite some regular collaborators to contribute, including cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, violinist Macie Stewart, poet Krista Franklin, and turntablist / drummer Ralph Darden (aka DJ Major Taylor). Even with the additional voices, though, the resulting record is distinctly Damon Locks. List of Demands is arguably the most Damon Locks Damon Locks record to date, with his depth of experience as a mic controller on full display as his voice soars above a strikingly melodic cadence of carefully chosen archival samples.
The title, List of Demands, is influenced by Locks’ work in Stateville Correctional Center with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. “In the summer of 2023 I taught a class where we developed a document that stated the desires of the incarcerated artists in the group,” he says. The group spent a summer session creating what would become the Artist Constitution, a document in which their beliefs, aspirations, and demands could be compiled, which would in turn be distributed outside the prison walls. A poster of that document is included in the vinyl edition of List of Demands.
“List of Demands is not just my list,” says Locks. “The list is in conveyance, in response, and in honor of all of those great Black speakers that turned a phrase to generate movement and change. It owes as much to Rammellzee, Fred Moten and Sun Ra’s oratory excellence as it does to Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, to Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson (across the pond), to Ruby Dee’s spoken recordings, and to others too numerous to mention.”
Damon Locks on ESS
for
Tracing The Lines
Reflecting on more than three decades of collaboration with Experimental Sound Studio for this recent piece in our Tracing The Lines zine, Damon Locks explores ESS’s role as a creative incubator, a space for sonic activism, and a home for experimental soundmakers across generations.
Deluxe Vinyl Package
List of Demands comes on a 140g vinyl LP inside a heavyweight jacket, with 16-page newsprint booklet designed by Damon Locks, A3 "Artist Constitution" insert poster, hype sticker and poly-lined innersleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST.
Available on limited edition color vinyl for $29 USD.
Also available on classic black vinyl for $24 USD.
(( photo by Jamie Kelter Davis ))
...about 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 Ayesha Jaco and Move Me Soul, and Tara Aisha Willis; 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 jaimie branch, Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Irreversible Entanglements, and more.
In 2018 Locks began work on a new project called Black Monument Ensemble. BME's debut album with 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.
Locks & BME's second 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?’”
In July 2023, International Anthem released Locks's project New Future City Radio, a duo collaboration with Rob Mazurek where the two artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people.
In January 2024, Locks releases List of Demands, his first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work.
!!! Also Available !!!
New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people.
New Future City Radio is available on limited edition "New Future City Shimmer" color vinyl LP inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket with obi strip, fold-out poster & dome-pattern inner sleeve..
