Tracing The Lines
No. 3
Creative exploration of International Anthem Recording Co. and the community that surrounds it.
Damon
Locks
on ESS
Untitled Damon art from the age of 19 or 20
I began my relationship with Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in the early 1990s. I think I was around 19 or 20 years old. I worked at The Field Museum of Natural History doing sound for new exhibits. ESS founder Lou Malozzi and I would get together in the downstairs of his own living space (where ESS found its start) to create sound environments for the Africa Hall exhibition (1993) and Life Over Time (1994). As a young art student at The School of the Art Institute and a guy in a post punk band, this was my first introduction to manipulating sound to create a feeling and not a song. ESS has changed location and leadership but maintains an ethos that draws soundmakers from all over the world to its doorstep.
Untitled Damon art from the
age of 19 or 20
ESS acquired a sound archive of Sun Ra recordings. SUN RA/EL SATURN COLLECTION consists of approximately 600 tapes dating from the 1950s to 1993. In order to highlight and bring attention to this archive ESS commissioned artists to respond to this archive. I was asked to be one of these artists. Alongside creating a body of visual work, I was asked by artist/writer Terri Kapsalis if I wanted to collaborate on something. We pulled in the talents of (old friend and Eternals/Trenchmouth band mate) musician Wayne Montana and animator Rob Shaw to create the nearly 18min long animated sound piece called Noon Moons. Created for an exhibition at ESS in 2012, it was recently shown March 21st - April 27th, 2024, at the gallery Corbett VS Dempsey in their Vault small theater area.
Damon’s visual work created for ESS exhibition in response to Sun Ra archive. Street Scenes: Other Dimensions
During the height of pandemic’s pre-vaccination era — two days after a white woman threatened to call the cops on Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper for supposedly threatening her when he was actually informing her that her dog should be leashed, and in between the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police and the uprisings that ensued all over the country — ESS asked me to curate a online concert, streamed live from musician’s separate living rooms. That evening, via ESS’s Quarantine Concert Series, I presented Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker, and myself performing a predominantly improvised piece called “Keep Your Mind Free.” The title was inspired by an image I drew/designed for a protest to release older incarcerated people and folks with preexisting conditions whose likelihood of surviving COVID in prison was slim. The evening was a catharsis of sorts, even though it was a lonely one (as I mentioned, I was performing alone in my apartment over Zoom). Nonetheless, the Quarantine Concert Series provided an international venue for musicians to communicate, protest, mourn, serenade, problem-solve, etc., inside an extremely dark and stifling time.
A few months later I pulled together the lion’s share of Black Monument Ensemble in the backyard of ESS to record what would be the second album. Engineer Alex Inglizian was game to mask up and gather outside with myself, a clarinetist (Angel Bat Dawid), and six vocalists (Philip Armstrong, Monique Golding, Erica Nwachukwu, Tramaine Paker, Richie Parks, Eric Tre’von), despite all the unknowns of a time when someone else's breath was the scariest thing imaginable. A month later, we concluded the recording session with the rest of the group indoors at ESS (Ben LaMar Gay, Dana Hall, and Arif Smith). When listening to that album, I can hear and feel the fear and exultation of that moment inside of the recording. The cicadas who sing into almost every microphone of that backyard performance bring to mind the days of making audio environmental vignettes for The Field Museum.
In 2022, Ken Vandermark, Tomeka Reid, and Andrew Clinkman were curating an ongoing salon for ESS called Option and they asked me to participate, commissioning a new piece and urging me to contemplate making something I had never done before or something I would really like to do. After much consideration I decided to do a set of music to highlight the kind of text-based work that I have made for spare Black Monument and New Future City Radio tunes and which is the primary way I work when peppering vocals into Exploding Star Orchestra songs. What would it look like to base a whole set of music on my texts? The performance was to take place where I had visual artwork on display inside an exhibition — an original wall drawing that is a collage of human emotion and experience titled Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part — at The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. The text based music and the performance was received well. Alex Inglizian was also the sound engineer for that performance. At the end of the evening, he suggested I record the material and that he would love to be the engineer. I took him up on that and sporadically dropped into ESS either alone or with guest musicians to go through the exciting process of putting together the recordings that became the album List of Demands (2025).
Details from Damon’s wall piece in the exhibition, Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part
The final stage of that album was completed by Dave Vettraino at IARC HQ (because Alex was having his second baby), but the love and groundwork provided by Alex and ESS as a whole helped build this set of songs from inception to realization. I am but one of so many artists that have engaged with ESS over the years. Writing this has really helped me reflect on how that space has been a support for the full span of my artistic growth. I am currently in the throes of a recording project duet with Lou Malozzi. From 1991 till now, I am excited to see what comes next!
Tracing The Lines is a creative exploration of International Anthem Recording Co. and the community that surrounds it.
Issue #3 is available.
This third annual installment explores the concept of Space as it relates to that community and the world as a whole—spaces that humans inhabit, spaces where humans create, spaces where humans meet & live, etc.