IARC0092

Damon Locks
List of Demands

Vinyl LP shipping & available in stores
January 31st, 2025

Who can see the shapes and colors as they are? 

(“Isn’t It Beautiful”)

List of Demands, Damon Locks’ first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized MF DOOM-meets-Nikki Giovanni rhythm experiments. The 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. And that seems to be the point. To jump-start the entire personality spectrum into action. Ecstatic positivity examined via his nuanced grasp of reality, all working toward that ever-evasive concept of what could be.  

List of Demands was set in motion when Locks was asked to present new sound work by Experimental Sound Studio at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago for a show called Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part. He also contributed visual work, portions of which can be seen in the artwork for the finished album. The pieces were guided by prompts from the exhibition’s curator, Asha Iman Veal, who aimed to “encourage deep thinking about parallel experiences and relationships between global artists of color and diverse Black artists.” 

ESS chief engineer Alex Inglizian encouraged Locks to expand upon and record the material after the show and volunteered to operate the controls for the occasion. This new phase brought in a number of Locks’ go to collaborators to bring depth and balance to the project: cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, violinist Macie Stewart, poet Krista Franklin, and turntablist / drummer Ralph Darden (aka DJ Major Taylor). The results, though, are distinctly Damon Locks. On top of that, the results are distinctly new for Damon Locks. Sure, there have been hints of List of Demands strewn throughout his catalog – the dense rhythms of his Black Monument Ensemble, the chaotic 404 cut n mix of New Future City Radio, the lysergic sci-fi deejay toasting of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, the dub-inflected post-punk of The Eternals – but this is a focused cross-section of its entirety. Arguably the most Damon Locks Damon Locks record to date. 

His immeasurable experience as a mic controller is certainly on display here, but his signature vocal rhythms seem to permeate the sample choices as well. Locks’ always notable great taste, informed by years of digging in the crates, certainly brings with it a penchant for top-notch sample construction. The unsung crate-digging heroes, though, are the ones whose knowledge extends to the unclassifiable sections. The bins below the bins. These are the people who leave the shop with a stack of sermons; obscure radio broadcasts from now-defunct stations; crumbling documents of a past which remains relevant; disappearing voices for those with ears to hear. Damon Locks has those ears, no doubt, and he definitely has those records. List of Demands utilizes samples of these Black Voices of the past in a strikingly rhythmic way, often yielding much of the meter to overlapping human vocal patterns rather than entirely filling that space with traditionally “musical” sounds. The result is a sort of multifaceted, groove-focused body music executed with enough finesse to make a complicated concept seem easy. 

This is our list of demands: Beauty, Form, Destiny, Love, Time, Future, and Light

The title, List of Demands, is inspired 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 developing 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 Damon. “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, Angela Davis, and Nikki Giovanni, to Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson (across the pond), to Ruby Dee’s spoken recordings, and to others too numerous to mention.”