“New Future City Radio” is a collaborative project from Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek—who also teamed up on Mazurek’s recent (and wonderful) “Lightning Dreamers,” where Locks served as a kind of narrator for the album. “New Future City Radio” moves and sounds like a mixtape, but more in the vein of something that’s been sculpted, designed, sweated over—think about the sounds and vibe of something like DJ Rupture’s “Special Gundpowder” or even maybe one of the Avalanches’ vintage mixes (like “Some People,” though “New Future City Radio” is way more political than any mix from the Avalanches).
“New Future City Radio” is designed to sound like a pirate radio station (or stations), with a huge mix of genres from track to track, Locks interjecting as a DJ or just coming in to comment with spoken word, field recordings, samples from what sound like real radio bits, and other types of ephemera. It really works. It’s an incredibly entertaining album and there are so many little surprises that sneak up on you as you’re listening.
There are big beats all over this album, starting with the lead single, “Yes,” an exhilarating song both because of the percussion and Locks’s charged vocals. In one of the coolest, most moving spoken bits on the album, Locks says, “I’m living in darkness/You’re living in darkness, but you don’t know it/It’s so dark out here I can’t even see/And that’s the point/You can’t see—you won’t move/They got you where they want you: nowhere/Shrouded in confusion, grasping at straws/When you’re living like this/you can’t envision lines of possibility/This is where the plan kicks in/You ask me if I can form myself into a giant robot/and swallow up this black hole/and free the entire universe/My answer to you is:/Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” Locks saying this repeating “yes”—in conjunction with the beat they have going here—is the kind of thing that will make you want to run through a wall.
Mazurek’s trumpet is all over this album too, adding color to tracks, pinning a solo right in the middle of a wild sample, pining in the background. He’s got some great playing on “Your Name Gonna Ring the Bell,” “Droids,” the latter half of “The Concord Hour,” and some cool work on “Twilight Shimmer,” where he doing some plaintive, deliberate playing for the first half of the track, and then it all slows down, into a mix of what sounds like bird songs and other natural noises (almost a little like Black Dice’s “Creature Comforts”) and Mazurek’s horn is hidden behind a curtain of noise, still there but barely.
“Polaris Radio” comes back to Locks as main narrator/DJ, accompanied by a beautiful sample of strings, bouncy percussion, intermittent blasts of static, vocals, and field recordings. He enters halfway through the song with a message that returns in a way to his earlier delivery on “Yes.” “Clear skies tonight/if you look up into the dark black infinity/you will catch a glimpse of Ursa Minor/forever hiding/two bears in the wilderness of forever/the very fine Polaris/a spike around which the sky rotates/even in the vastness of endlessness/we can find our way/for we have hands to hold/in the wilderness.”