Damon Locks & D Composed | Dawning

With Dawning, Chicago artist and composer Damon Locks joins forces with D-Composed, a Black chamber music collective dedicated to music by Black composers. The collaboration brings Locks’ sample-based practice, electronics, and archival voices into dialogue with strings, creating music that sits somewhere between contemporary classical composition, experimental jazz, and sound collage.

Rather than treating the ensemble as a conventional string section, Locks builds an evolving environment of repetition, fragmented speech, electronic textures, and acoustic movement. The result feels both intimate and expansive, carrying the communal and politically conscious spirit that runs throughout his work.

Dawning is meditative, searching, and quietly powerful—a meeting of electronic experimentation and chamber music that transforms historical memory into something immediate and forward-looking.