Damon Locks - List of Demands. LP [140g Black Vinyl]

Damon Locks - List of Demands. LP [140g Black Vinyl]

140g Classic Black Vinyl inside a heavyweight jacket, with 16-page newsprint booklet designed by Damon Locks, A3 "Artist Constitution" insert poster, hype sticker and poly-lined innersleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST.

List of Demands, Damon Locks’ first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments.

The title, List of Demands, is influenced by Locks’s work in Stateville Correctional Center with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. “In the summer of 2023 I taught a class where we developed a document that stated the desires of the incarcerated artists in the group,” he says. The group spent a summer session creating what would become the Artist Constitution, a document in which their beliefs, aspirations, and demands could be compiled, which would in turn be distributed outside the prison walls. A poster of that document is included in the vinyl edition of List of Demands.

“List of Demands is not just my list,” says Locks. “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. It owes as much to Rammellzee, Fred Moten and Sun Ra’s oratory excellence as it does to Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis, to Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson (across the pond), to Ruby Dee’s spoken recordings, and to others too numerous to mention.” 

Released January 31, 2025

Tracklist:

1.Reversed
2.Distance 
3.Holding the Dawn in Place (Beyond pt. 2)
4.Everything’s Under Control
5.Isn’t It Beautiful 
6.High Priestess
7.Meteors of Fear 
8.List of Demands
9.The Signal is Hot 
10.Control Power 
11.Click 
12.Reversed pt. 2 (Something to Love)