The dense, iridescent drone of an untold number of singing cicadas seeps into Now, the 2021 sophomore full-length by Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble. In August and September 2020, 11 of the collective’s members gathered to record at Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio, both inside and out back in the garden behind the building—and the environmental sounds audible on the album carry the resonant signature of summer’s heat, which sticks to the group’s melodies like a sweaty shirt. The insects don’t overwhelm the music, and thanks to tasteful editing their song sometimes drops in and out the same way Locks’s weathered samples do. The cicadas get plenty of airtime on “Now (Forever Momentary Space),” and their unruly pulse sometimes seems to react to the ensemble, slipping into a polyrhythm or aligning with a beat. “I hope y’all don’t cut the cicadas out,” clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid says at the song’s close. “That ending, wooo, they sounded good.”
The Black Monument Ensemble made Now as a salve against the despair of several overlapping crises; as bad as things have gotten, they seem to say, we can draw on our communities to improve tomorrow. The cicadas charge the air in a way that intensifies the electricity these musicians share and enhances their message. The natural world isn’t distinct from the world where we live, work, and play, and on Now the environment responded to a communal human experience with a nurturing sound bath.
The Black Monument Ensemble recorded Now inside and outside ESS in Edgewater.
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