Wednesday, February 26th, in the lecture room of the Philosophical Research Society!
Damon Locks presents List of Demands,
his first solo performance in Los Angeles,
held with International Anthem.
”List of Demands is my first foray into creating a whole album from spoken, text-based work. It
owes as much to Fred Moten, MF DOOM, and Sun Ra’s oratory excellence as it does to
Kwame Ture / Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and Nikki Giovanni, to Linton
Kwesi Johnson, to Ruby Dee’s spoken recordings, and to others too numerous
to mention. List of Demands is not just my list. The list is in conveyance, in response, and in
honor of all of those great Black speakers that turned a phrase to generate movement and
change. Thank you.”
Damon Locks is an inspiration. From the lineages of labor that he cites to his on the ground work with incarcerated artists, his art thrives in the richest of dialogues. The sample-based constructions present throughout List Of Demands 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.
Capacity is limited & we highly
encourage RSVP’ing in advance.
Please reach out with any questions
& never lose sight of Beauty, Form, Destiny,
Love, Time, Future, and Light.
(we’ve reached capacity from our allotment of tickets
& are linking you to the PRS’. supply once these sell out,
there will be a small handful available at the door)
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist, musician, and deejay. Known for decades of varied projects in Chicago’s underground music & art scenes, Locks’ CV starts in the late 1980s with the band Trenchmouth, and is highlighted by work with The Eternals (co-led by Trenchmouth bandmate Wayne Montana), Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, collaborations with Nicole Mitchell, Ben LaMar Gay, and many others.
In recent years Locks has traversed almost every media discipline… including sound/animation work using unheard Sun Ra recordings from Experimental Sound Studio’s archive (with Terri Kapsalis, Wayne Montana, and Rob Shaw); various collaborations with contemporary dancers & choreographers including Ayesha Jaco and Move Me Soul, and Tara Aisha Willis; teaching work with incarcerated artists for the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville maximum security prison; and producing cover art for dozens of albums, including several International Anthem releases by jaimie branch, Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Irreversible Entanglements, and more.