New Future City Radio by Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek
Radio acts like a sheer white gallery wall, enshrining everything that occupies its space with a sense of importance. Art sits atop this venerable perch not because the artist put it there themselves but instead because an expert critic chose to make room for it on their precious wall. Though people tend to view radio with a much greater degree of anti-corporate skepticism than they do with art galleries, the same sense remains that being on the radio conveys some mark of quality. For a pop station, this may mean that a song has succeeded among the court of public opinion, while for college radio it means that the song was labeled as sufficiently cool by some hip 20-year-old dj. To avoid such a role for radio would require radio to stop existing entirely, since, no matter who is at the helm of the station, assumptions will always be made about why certain songs get selected.
For two members of Chicago’s avant-garde scene, however, such “gallery walls” ought not to be labeled indestructible until efforts have been made to remove them. When Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek put pen to paper for their new collaborative album New Future City Radio, they set course for a fantasy radio station run in the most chaotic way possible. In this future landscape of pirate radio, anonymous crews broadcast without government permission, making the music selection as unfiltered and random as possible. For this particular future pirate radio station, the songs feature unreliable beats underpinning esoteric, paranoid lyrics delivered as a doomsday sermon. Other tracks place improvised jazz solos at center stage, giving an interesting context to the sometimes explosive, industrial percussion and synth sounds. In other words, this sounds like no radio playlist you’ve ever heard, evoking surprise and disbelief every time the record shifts to a make-believe radio break.
Where many albums lash out against institutions of power, very few attack these institutions by their very form. Of course, no mass-media is free of the gallery wall effect, but taking such dramatic steps to highlight the absurdity of our blind trust in these authorities works wonders at draining their power. New Future City Radio plays a key role in mental liberation and deprogramming, since it invites us to envision a new and democratic form of mass media. If you long for a world where you flip on your car radio and hear something that only Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek could dream up, get out there and give the world your own New Future City Radio.
-Michael
