Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek 'New Future City Radio' LP

New Future City Radio, the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek.

In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people.

These two artists have worked together from the peak days of the late 90s / early 00s Chicago music scene up through the present day, which has seen Locks featured as lead vocalist of the multiple critically-acclaimed Exploding Star Orchestra albums composed/produced by Mazurek. In recent years, Locks has also earned great renown from his revolutionary, expansive latter-day gospel/jazz project Black Monument Ensemble.

New Future City Radio finds the duo creating a natural but innovatively-assembled blend of the sounds of those two projects, with Locks’s BME-style sample-based sound collage creating compositional beds underneath the signature Orson Wells-like vocal delivery he’s developed through his work with ESO, alongside Roland SP flourishes and arresting brass improvisations by Mazurek. The album is also filled with vignettes as fractured radio transmissions, featuring contributions by guests including Roberto Lange (Helado Negro) and Mauricio Takara (Sao Paulo Underground). It’s a deep avant-garde echo of the legendary Bomb Squad (Locks even sounding a bit like a tape-delayed Check D on the vox), with beat artifacts spanning the whole gamut from pre to post golden era hip-hop - mixing OG Brooklyn boombox sound with the sci-fi boom-bap of late 90s Def Jux and/or Dan The Automator’s 75 Ark.