Photo: Jamie Kelter Davis

A seminal figure in Chicago’s underground music scenes, artist, educator, musician, deejay, and vocalist Damon Locks has been leading and involved in various projects since the late 1980s, including Trenchmouth, The Eternals, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, Black Monument Ensemble and collaborated with artists such as Nicole Mitchell and Ben LaMar Gay, amongst many more. A man of many talents and disciplines, Locks has in recent years expanded his creative work across different media, including sound/animation projects with unreleased Sun Ra recordings, collaborations with dancers and choreographers, and residencies at The New Quorum in New Orleans. He has also worked with incarcerated artists for the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project, produced album artwork for International Anthem label mates like Makaya McCraven or Irreversible Entanglements, and worked on numerous interdisciplinary projects.

List of Demands is his latest work, a longplayer which for the first time is completely based off his poetry and texts, whilst still retaining his signature collage style. As is so often the case for Locks’ work, on List of Demands we find him “projecting an ecstatic positivity via his nuanced grasp of reality, and lucidly articulating the ever-evasive concept of what could be”, as the press release describes.

The album sprouted from an invitation by Experimental Sound Studio to create a piece for an exhibition. Later Locks was encouraged by ESS’s Alex Inglizian to expand it into a full recording, and he enlisted regular collaborators including cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, violinist Macie Stewart, poet Krista Franklin, and turntablist / drummer Ralph Darden (aka DJ Major Taylor) to help bring the album to life. Despite their contributions, List of Demands remains a deeply personal work, described as “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 album’s title stems from 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 explains. The group then spent a summer creating the Artist Constitution, a document outlining their beliefs, aspirations, and demands, which was later distributed outside the prison. “List of Demands is not just my list,” said Locks. “The list is in conveyance, in response, and in honour 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.”

We’ll have to wait until January 31st for List of Demands to be out through International Anthem but can already get an exhilarating taste of what’s to come with the album’s lead single ‘Click’. Here it is.