New Future City Radio

Description

New Future City Radio, the first duo collaboration from long-time 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.These two artists have worked together since the peak days of the Chicago music scene of the late 90s / early 00s up to the present, which saw Locks featured as the lead vocalist on multiple critically acclaimed Exploding Star Orchestra albums composed / produced by Mazurek. In recent years, Locks has also gained great renown through his groundbreaking and expansive latter-day gospel / jazz project Black Monument Ensemble.New Future City Radio finds the duo creating a natural yet innovatively assembled blend of the sounds from these two projects, with Locks' BME-style sample-based sound collage creating compositional beds under the Orson Welles-type vocal signature he has developed through his work with ESO, alongside Mazurek's Roland SP flourishes and striking brass improvisations. The album is also filled with vignettes in the form of fractured radio transmissions, with guest contributions from 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 rhythmic artifacts spanning the full range of pre- to post-golden age hip-hop - mixing OG Brooklyn boombox sound with the late 90s Def Jux sci-fi boom-bap and/or Dan The Automator's 75 Ark.