DAMON LOCKS & ROB MAZUREK - New Future City Radio

The concept behind the album is intriguing: imagine it as a radio broadcast slotted into a schedule, exactly as Spike Lee envisioned the narrative framework through the community radio station of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn in “Do the Right Thing” (1989), in which DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy served as a kind of omniscient narrator of the neighborhood's events. We've grown used to seeing Damon Locks use vocal, radio and sound samples both with his Black Monument Ensemble and with Exploding Star Orchestra, but this time, again alongside Rob Mazurek (cornet, trumpet, flute, synthesizers), an entire concept is built around an imaginary radio station for an ideal community broadcasting across the city. “Near Future City Radio” is the first work officially released as a duo, after years of collaborations born within the Chicago music scene, of which both have been and remain key figures. Guests include Roberto Lange (Helado Negro) and Mauricio Takara (Sao Paulo Underground).

Starting essentially from the electro/hip-hop boombox sound of “The Sun Returns”, the album's fabric unfolds mainly through the sound collages Locks builds from noise, loops and synths, over which the African-American musician's spoken-word fragments and the horn incursions of the trumpeter based in Marfa, Texas, develop. Both artists' experience as multimedia creators makes this phonographic object even more compelling, since the album is constructed, and consequently experienced, as a stream – exactly in keeping with the nature of electronic media such as radio – broadcast illegally: a pirate radio station transmitting to the community, beyond the control of governments and corporations.

Among the most successful episodes are the nostalgic electro-spiritual of “The Concord Hour” and the contemplative ambient-free of “Twilight Shimmer”, which at 5 and 9 minutes respectively far exceed the album's average track length of 1-2 minutes.

Under the revolutionary star of Gil Scott-Heron, and alongside label mates Angel Bat Dawid and Irreversible Entanglements, Locks and Mazurek carve out a sliver of freedom in which the past is reimagined through musical instruments – tools that are in themselves timeless, and thus able to speak to the future, just like those once wielded by Sun Ra and Miles Davis. In its bid to update a notion of communal, self-organized afrofuturism built on the independent use of available media, “New Future City Radio” ends up sounding too fragmented and cerebral, losing the gospel fervor of works built on a similar logic, such as the BME's “Now” (International Anthem, 2021), echoed here mainly in “New Future”.

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13/12/2023