About

List of Demands, Damon Locks’s 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 Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style 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’s 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 (ESS) at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography inside an exhibition called Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part. He also contributed visual work, portions of which can be seen in List of Demands' album art. 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.”

The title, List of Demands, is influenced by Locks’s 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. — via Label

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Label: International Anthem Recording Company
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Released: 2025
Genre: Electronic, Free Jazz
Style: Experimental

File under: International Anthem Recording Company
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