Damon Locks is Chicago's arty, punk rock granddad. He got his start in Trenchmouth and solidified his infamy with a turn in the Eternals, after which he earned his wings aiding in the ascension of Rob Mazurek and his Exploding Star Orchestra. His restless mind and protein talents have lead to incursions, and enduring impressions, in the worlds of visual art, performance, and education. He has arranged a number of album covers for International Anthem releases, has performed work with the incarcerated through Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville, and is friends with Angel Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, and Dana Hall. I could keep going with this introduction. Really I could. However, I have another purpose today, and that is to discuss his latest album, NOW.
So what is NOW? It was something you couldn't have stopped had you tried. In the summer of 2020, following months of lockdown and the racial awakening that shook the country, Damon convened many of his talented friends and associates behind the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago to record some takes in the open air. This was not meant to be an album, but there was no way it wasn't going to be. After the session wrapped, it became clear that these tapes couldn't just sit on a shelf collecting dust and becoming buried under a lack of ambition. Hence the urgency expressed in the project's name, NOW. Had these recordings not had the spark of the eternal muse cascading through them, they would have been named, Later. At the time of recording, the motivating operation of the collaboration was to capture the essence of sight and recognition. The observation of one's self through another, specifically as it applies to black Americans. A wordless exchange of synchronicity, which momentarily aligns the worlds and histories of souls floating in separate streams. Something he calls, the "Black Nod."
The final exhibition, embossed with Damon's name and the collective moniker the Black Monument Ensemble, is part collage, part history lesson, but more than both- a map of moods and minds, drawn together like streams rushing down a mountain to spill and lash at the mossy stones, and eventually swirl together in single a shimmering body in the basin of a valley. Bright, clean, and fathoms deep, NOW begins with a modern orchestral sweep and soul-soothing psalm that parts the gloom of clouded consciousness to let the light cut through and illuminate a meadow-like calm, disturbed only slightly, by a soft, whispering breeze. Very little of what follows will be as placating, escalating instead to personify the celebratory. This is particularly true of the whistle and warp of "Barbara Jones-Hogu and Elizabeth Catlett Discuss Liberation" which proceeds like a summer parade, but also like a mantra grounding meditation, its two paths diverging and intersecting at odd junctures, but also true of the wind and brass duel of the bucking beat led closer "The Body Is Electric." Amongst the more instructive moments on NOW, are the bop and break swot of society's embedded double-bind brinksmanship embodied on "The People vs The Rest of Us," and the pained false-starts and spin-outs elucidated on the cold rebuke "Movement and You."
I'm probably a fool for trying to tackle this album with anything short of a sixty-page dissertation, but once your analysis of an album starts to require an index of citations, you have to ask yourself whether what you've written serves a greater purpose than simply, and earnestly, recommending that someone listen to a record. I think NOW has much more to say for itself than I could credibly interpret and transcribe on my own. Links and Bandcamp player are below. The door is ajar, all you have to do is push to be let in.
