This Is The Beginning, Not The End
~ Tracing The Lines ~
BLACK MONUMENT ENSEMBLE
On an occasionally snowing spring day in Chicago – April 20th, 2021 – just ahead of the release of Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble's sophomore album NOW, International Anthem's Alejandro Ayala, Scottie McNiece and Lindsey Stepney traversed the city with microphone and camera, aiming to eternalize a moment in time with every BME band member outside of their respective homes.
Included in this piece published in our first zine Tracing The Lines (now available online for the first time) are a selection of film portraits (shot by Ayala) along with a chorus collection of words from the band members (recorded & transcribed by Stepney), all captured on that day in that momentary space.
NEW SUNS
Documentary screening in Chicago
Chicago, Friday July 14th: Constellation hosts the debut of New Suns, a documentary about the graduation of the second University Without Walls (UWW) Stateville cohort. The UWW program inside Stateville Correctional Center (maximum security prison in Illinois) is a collaboration between the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) and Northeastern Illinois University.
The graduation ceremony took place inside Stateville prison’s auditorium building, featured keynote remarks by Fred Moten, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and special remarks by Gina Dent, co-founder of Visualizing Abolition. The ceremony also featured a guest musical performance by Chance the Rapper. Graduating students were Michael Bell, Reginald BoClair, Darnell Lane, Juan Luna, and Daniel Perkins.
The New Suns documentary features music by Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble. For many years Locks has been involved with PNAP, through which he has worked as an arts educator at Stateville prison. Locks has cited his work at Stateville as a major influence on the themes, messages, music and lyrics he writes with Black Monument Ensemble.
The Chicago debut screening event will conclude with a discussion between the documentary creators, student’s loved ones, and PNAP members that helped plan the graduation ceremony. In addition to New Suns, they will share some words from the graduating students and a short film about the celebration held the day after the graduation ceremony called Building Abolition Feminism Now: A Chicago PNAP Function.
((( 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, jaimie branch, and more.
In July 2023, International Anthem releases Locks's newest 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.
BLACK MONUMENT ENSEMBLE
Originally conceived as a medium for 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.
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?’”
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Damon Locks - Black Monument Ensemble
NOW
“The previous Black Monument Ensemble long-player, Where Future Unfolds, was an absolute knockout. NOW might be even better.” - Aquarium Drunkard
“Another grand and luminous statement.” - Pitchfork
“Locks’s ensemble work — with all its spiritual jazz arrangements, vibrant drum breaks and esoteric movie clips — feels overtly communal, like a private conversation between those who understand the nuances of Black culture.” - The New York Times
"Some moments feature blissful, gospel-tinged vocals, others offer lilting jazz swing, while others hit with sinewy, righteous funk or roiling drums. But on NOW, Locks fits them all into the same song” - Bandcamp
*** Deluxe Vinyl Package ***
The album art for NOW is a smash hit by Damon Locks, a true master of the medium. The LP version is 140 gram vinyl (pressed by Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST) inside a heavyweight matte jacket, with IARC obi strip, dome patterned innersleeve, and includes a a large 17" x 22" broadsheet insert (with liner notes, photos, and a fold-out illustration by Locks).
Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!
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Damon Locks - Black Monument Ensemble
Where Future Unfolds
"This is a major work that should be encountered by anyone remotely interested in modern aural and performance art, improvisation and truth." – All Music Guide
"It is the sound of the best kind of American spirituality and freedom, a product of heavens imagined by both the grounded traditionalists of the Black church and by the Afrofuturist likes of Sun Ra." – AFROPUNK
"Embracing the street corner, the amen corner, the block party and the Black Panther party, Locks offers up an accessible avant garde that is fierce, funky, fresh and free as a motherfucker." – WIRE Magazine
"This is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times." – Pitchfork
“When people ask me what's my favourite album of 2019... I just say: Damon Locks.” - Gilles Peterson
Deluxe Vinyl Package
*** 2022 REVISED EDITION ***
The 2022 revised edition of Where Future Unfolds features updated artwork with reimagined colors by Damon Locks. The heavyweight, reverse board, gatefold jacket includes photos of hi res photos of Black Monument Ensemble at their debut performance, and comes banded in an cream and crimson IARC obi strip. The 140 gram, black vinyl LP (pressed by Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST) comes inside a classic IARC dome-patterned innersleeve.
Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America
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 these albums, 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
These (and all of our) albums are distributed by our good 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.
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!!!
((( photo by Kristie Kahns )))
