New Future City Radio

Description

New Future City Radio, the first duo collaboration from longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek, will be released on July 28. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that spins like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multimedia artists envision community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people. The two artists have worked together since the peak days of Chicago’s late-90s/early-00s music scene through to the present day, which saw Locks featured as lead vocalist on the multiple critically acclaimed albums of Exploding Star Orchestra composed/produced by Mazurek. In recent years, Locks has also gained great renown through his groundbreaking and expansive late-days gospel/jazz project Black Monument Ensemble. New Future City Radio finds the duo creating a natural yet innovatively assembled blend of the sounds of these two projects, with Locks’ sample-based sound collage in the style of BME creating compositional beds beneath the Orson Wells-like vocal signature he developed through his work with ESO, alongside Roland SP flourishes and Mazurek’s striking brass improvisations. The album is also filled with vignettes in the form of fractured radio transmissions, with contributions from guests such as Roberto Lange (Helado Negro) and Mauricio Takara (Sao Paulo Underground). It is a deep avant-garde echo of the legendary Bomb Squad (Locks even sounds a bit like a tape-delayed Check D on the vox), with rhythm artifacts spanning the full range of pre- to post-golden-age 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.