List of Demands, Damon Locks’s 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 sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal participation in the culture. Locks’s decades-long resume connects the dots between experimental improvisation, sample based hip hop, punk, and poetry – each done at the highest level and with a list of collaborators that could spin the head of even the most jaded listener. And that seems to be the point. To jump-start the entire personality spectrum into action. Ecstatic positivity examined via his nuanced grasp of reality, all working toward that ever-evasive concept of what could be.

List of Demands was set in motion when Locks was asked to present new sound work by Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography inside an exhibition called Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part. He also contributed visual work, portions of which can be seen in List of Demands' album art. The pieces were guided by prompts from the exhibition’s curator, Asha Iman Veal, who aimed to “encourage deep thinking about parallel experiences and relationships between global artists of color and diverse Black artists.”

After the show, ESS chief engineer Alex Inglizian encouraged Locks to expand upon and record the material, and volunteered to operate the controls for the occasion. This new phase brought in a number of Locks’s go-to collaborators to bring depth and balance to the project: cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, violinist Macie Stewart, poet Krista Franklin, and turntablist / drummer Ralph Darden (aka DJ Major Taylor). The results, though, are distinctly Damon Locks. On top of that, the results are distinctly new for Damon Locks. Sure, there have been hints of List of Demands strewn throughout his catalog – the dense rhythms of his Black Monument Ensemble, the chaotic 404 cut-and-mix of New Future City Radio, the lysergic sci-fi deejay toasting of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, the dub-inflected post-punk of The Eternals – but this is a focused cross-section of its entirety. Arguably the most "Damon Locks" Damon Locks record to date.

His depth of experience as a mic controller is certainly on display here, but his signature vocal rhythms seem to permeate the sample choices as well. Locks’s always notable great taste, informed by years of digging in the crates, certainly brings with it a penchant for top-notch sample construction. The unsung crate-digging heroes, though, are the ones whose knowledge extends to the unclassifiable sections. The bins below the bins. These are the people who leave the shop with a stack of sermons, obscure radio broadcasts from now-defunct stations, crumbling documents of a past which remains relevant, disappearing voices for those with ears to hear. Locks has those ears, no doubt, and he definitely has those records. List of Demands utilizes samples of these Black voices of the past in a strikingly rhythmic way, often yielding much of the meter to overlapping human vocal patterns rather than entirely filling that space with traditionally “musical” sounds. The result is a sort of multifaceted, groove-focused body music executed with enough finesse to make a complicated concept seem easy.