Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble Where Future Unfolds

Description

The Chicago-based improvisational artist layers politically charged sound collages over drum machines and a childrens choir. The result is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times.

The music moves easily between Afrofuturist gospeltypified by the spacy synths of Which I Believe It Will and the luminous electro beats of Which I Believe I Amand hip-hop grime. The Colors That You Bring sets the choirs soulful harmonies against wavering strings and murky boom-bap drums, like a civil rights protest movie scored the RZA. Upping the intensity, sampled fragments of archived speeches are embedded in the songs; on Solar Power a voice proclaims, There’s no black person on this planet that will disagree with freedom. These spoken snippets give the album a militant edge, recalling interludes from the classic Public Enemy records, where speeches from social reformers like Frederick Douglass were fused with steely breaks.

In the way that music from old eras can be sampled and repurposed into new forms, Lockss majestic work strives to reach better days by looking back and learning from the past. – Pitchfork