Damon Locks Shares Single “Holding The Dawn In Place (Beyond Pt. 2)”

Damon Locks – the Chicago-based visual artist, educator, musician, deejay, and vocalist who is known as the voice of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, former frontman of legendary punk band Trenchmouth, The Eternals, and leader of latter-day liberation music collective Black Monument Ensemble (BME) – releases the new single titled “Holding the Dawn in Place (Beyond pt. 2).”

The track, which also comes via animated video by Locks and longtime collaborator Rob Shaw, is the second offering from his forthcoming solo album List of Demands (International Anthem) set for release on January 31, 2025. 

“Holding the Dawn in Place (Beyond pt. 2)” starts with a haunted guitar loop before Locks’s BME bandmate Ben LaMar Gay joins to spotlight the melody with his cornet. Locks enters shortly after, with his trademark dry but deeply confident delivery, reading his words: “Morning birds sing when it’s still dark. Too dark to attract predators. Staving off the light, blocking the entrance. Holding the dawn in place, we keep time knowing the midnight darkness.” The piece unfolds over the subsequent three minutes, punctuated by a fiery but contained cornet solo from Gay in the outro.

In the video for “Holding the Dawn in Place (Beyond pt. 2),” the duotone and DIY-style imagery of the zine Locks created for the List of Demands LP package comes to life, with archival footage and photos animated by Shaw to vibrate inside the framework of Locks’s type-written poetry. Occasional glimpses of Locks in front of a table of electronics and samplers (donning a mirror ball helmet) time travel between scenes of Civil Rights-era protest and unrest, situating the unmistakable image of the legendary mic controller fluidly in context with the source material that underpins List of Demands (and most of his musical output to date).