Damon Locks & D-Composed - Dawning (LP)

Dawning is a collaboration between Chicago creative music mainstay Damon Locks and burgeoning Black chamber music collective D-Composed, featuring violinists Khelsey Zarraga and Anya Brumfield, violist Seth Pae, and cellist Lindsey Sharpe. The album was recorded live in the auditorium of The Land School, Rebuild Foundation’s headquarters in a reconstituted former elementary school on Chicago’s south side, where D-Composed & International Anthem have been creative partners-in-residence since its opening in 2025. The album’s sonic palette pairs Locks’ live sampling, beat knowledge, and spoken word swagger with D-Composed’s uniquely improvisational take on the string quartet.

The Land School itself is the result of a massive undertaking by Rebuild Foundation and its founder, artist Theaster Gates, who for the last couple decades have transformed disused spaces into “sites of creative production, artistic experimentation, radical hospitality, archival stewardship and land cultivation.” At The Land School, public programming produced by creative partners-in-residence supports Rebuild's mission to expand proximity and access to cultural production on the South Side of Chicago. “What began as a reflection on our relationship to the land became a sonic experiment reflecting blackness in the present moment through hope, rage, protest, and resistance,” says Locks and Zarraga in the album’s co-written liner notes.

What we hear on Dawning is what Locks and D-Composed brought to the auditorium on April 11, 2026: a live performance meant to be “a sound experience that pulls you in and wrings you out.” The recorded document is hard to argue with. From sublime and consonant downbeat grooves to genuinely frightening, dissonant and anxious meltdowns—the six pieces that make up the album cover so much musical ground with such an expert touch that it can be difficult to remember that we’re listening to something that occurred all at once in the same room.

This is in spite of the fact that the album begins with a solitary cello calling out against only the sounds of the fully occupied room itself: gentle shuffling and small breaths, settling across the stereo spectrum of the opening track “Dawning (On Us)”—a slowly building theme augmented by Locks’ samples of previous D-Composed performances announces the musicians’ arrival in dramatic fashion.

Dialing the tension back, a looped 2-bar slow jam guides the listener into “We Stay Beginning,” the first vocal-forward piece on the album. Locks’ skills as a mic controller are on full display here in a similar way to his 2024 spoken beat masterpiece List of Demands, though here the performance is much further out, deconstructed dub-style à la his contributions to Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra.

"We stay in full bloooom!"

“Reflecting (On Us),” on the other hand, is unlike anything else in Locks’ sonic registry, and it’s here that the freshly tilled land of this collaboration yields its unique fruit. The track is a powerful showcase of the strings of D-Composed, and undoubtedly the centerpiece of the album. A dark and ennui-filled solo cello starts this ominous piece, followed by an ascendant droning intensity building as the remaining members of the ensemble enter. The surface noise crackles from Locks’ rig feel like actual flames atop a repeating heartbeat pulse. Loopers are playing and players are looping—it’s difficult to tell what is a live moment and what is a sample. Except that it’s all a live moment: even the samples are being blasted through the PA, gently reverberating in the early spring air on Dorchester Avenue, just outside of the building walls. The apex of dissonance hits as the lone human voice echoes in a repeating sampled phrase:

"It was though I stepped into a strange city—a city from which all people had fled"

The album closer, “Don’t Recede,” sends us off with a straightforward message of resilience. The tune’s nascent scraping and droning dissonance is reframed as a consonant experience almost immediately when the voice of singer Monique Golding, Locks’ longtime comrade in Black Monument Ensemble, enters. “Don’t bend to the noise” she sings, quietly understated, as the sound of the string ensemble is bolstered by Lock’s mysterious and percussive sampler work.

It’s the perfect summation of an afternoon of live performance—an exercise in contemplative, disjointed positivity, related to us here as a recorded document of an actual moment shared by a group of people in an intentionally purposed room. The spirit of the endeavor seems to suggest that the feeling of unity in that moment can radiate outward, transforming all it touches: a room, a neighborhood, a city, state, a country, a planet, a solar system, a universe.

"And seek wisdom, to make wise decisions"