New Future City Radio

Rob Mazurek and Damon Locks (Black Monument Ensemble) have collaborated since the late 1990s. Despite the many projects theyve participated in (including two 2020s Exploding Star Orchestra albums, Dimensional Stardust and Lightning Dreamers), New Future City Radio is their first duo collaboration. They had some help in select spots from percussionist Mauricio Tanaka (Mazureks bandmate in Sao Paulo Underground), and vocalists Roberto Carlos Lange (aka Helado Negro) and Brandi Augustus, among others. This 40-minute, 18-track, post-futurist sonic collage is structured like a mixtape recorded from pirate radio broadcasts. Samples, beats, effects, scripted texts, and musical ideas past and present collide, combine, separate, and evolve in structured experimentation and improvisation. Indirectly, this music addresses important questions about notions of community in the 21st century. It offers possibilities to learn, a collective resistance to injustice and oppression, and the potential to learn how to disseminate information, among themselves and over unregulated radio waves. Opener "5-4-3-2-1" is a case in point. The title serves as call letters for "New Future City Radio, broadcasting 24/7 from rooftops unknown." Immediately sampled go-go and drum funk beats, layers of noise and percussion instruments -- gamelan and chimes, log drums, bata, conga, timbales -- are synthetically treated, then reformulated into wonky rhythm tracks as insistent and hypnotic as they are chaotic. There are some precedents for recordings like this: Producer Adrian Sherwoods 80s sides with Tackhead, Mark Stewart and the Maffia, Dub Syndicate, and Playgroup all come to mind, as do the Sublime Frequencies anthologies of pirated underground and radio broadcasts from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean (albeit in a more abstract way). Check the single "Yes" as an example: hip-hop, African rhythms, and political polemics offer a mantra-like anthem for protest. "Your Name Gonna Ring the Bell" grafts mutant funk rhythms under Mazureks winding, labyrinthine cornet lines, synth bass, and stacked rap vocals. "New Future" by contrast offers rave-up, Afro-futurist soul and spiritual yet lusty chorus vocals atop crescendo-laden funk. "Support the Youth (With Sound) is a spacy, multi-tracked synth and percussion ballad with a fragmented melody thats sweet and contemplative. "The Concord Hour"s rhythm tracks owe creatively to the influence of David Byrnes and Brian Enos My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, while the haunted synth, forlorn cornet, and bell-and-stick-like rhythms in "Twilight Shimmer" reflect a possible 21st century articulation of Jon Hassells Fourth World: Possible Musics approach. "Suspense in the Grip of Suspense" is an abstract, paranoid meld of urgent spoken word, vanguard jazz trumpet, and ambience, while "Polaris Radio" offers blissed-out synth basslines atop skittering percussion lines, and sonic abstraction and deconstruction. Across New Future City Radio, the historic and cultural past reflects the future in fragments. Throughout, these ghostly and propulsive rhythms communicate, divide, and commingle, and are woven through with deep dub effects, avant-jazz, global pop, hip-hop, and woven rhythms drawn from several global traditions spindled, reshaped, and presented anew by the creators. ~ Thom Jurek