Damon Locks - List of Demand (2025) [Hi-Res]

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.

DAMON LOCKS - voice & electronics
KRISTA FRANKLIN - voice on "High Priestess"
RALPH DARDEN - drums on "Isn't It Beautiful" & turntables on "Meteors of Fear"
BEN LAMAR GAY - cornet on "Holding the Dawn in Place" & melodica on "Click"
MACIE STEWART - violin on "Distance" & "Isn't It Beautiful"