The Black Monument Ensemble is a music and movement project created by Chicago-based visual artist, composer, musician, sound artist, deejay, and educator Damon Locks. In 2015, Locks composed a solo sound-collage piece entitled Where Future Unfolds. He initially pulled samples from Civil Rights-era speeches and recordings to create an improvisational pallet for performance on his drum machine. Over the next few years, however, the project evolved into a 15-piece group that included the composer on vocals and electronics, clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, drummer Dana Hall, and percussionist Arif Smith, as well as singers (alumni of the Chicago Children's Choir) and dancers (members of Chicago youth dance company Move Me Soul). The group's size could be adapted to accommodate almost any performance venue. At various times, the ensemble has included trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Ben Lamar Gay and cellist Tomeka Reid. As Locks' work evolved, it intersected jazz, vanguard improv, gospel, hip-hop, and electronica, evoking the inspiration of classic albums such as Eddie Gale's Black Rhythm Happening, Archie Shepp's Attica Blues, and Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, while its form and function recalled the loose structure and musical explorations of fellow Chicagoan Philip Cohran the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. The band's first full performance of Where Future Unfolds was performed and recorded live at Garfield Park Conservatory as part of Red Bull Music Festival in Chicago, on November 15, 2018. In the late spring of 2019, an album documenting the concert was released by International Anthem.

At the end of the 2020's pandemic summer, Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble set up their instruments and microphones in the garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio and hit "record." Despite the singers and players encountering the material for the first time, it took only a few live takes to capture the seven songs that made up the album NOW; it was released by International Anthem in April 2021. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi