Dawning is a collaboration between Chicago creative music mainstay Damon Locks and burgeoning Black chamber music collective D-Composed, featuring violinists Khelsey Zarraga and Anya Brumfield, violist Seth Pae, and cellist Lindsey Sharpe. The album was recorded live in the auditorium of The Land School, Rebuild Foundation’s headquarters in a reconstituted former elementary school on Chicago’s south side, where D-Composed & International Anthem have been creative partners-in-residence since its opening in 2025. The album’s sonic palette pairs Locks’ live sampling, beat knowledge, and spoken word swagger with D-Composed’s uniquely improvisational take on the string quartet.

The Land School itself is the result of a massive undertaking by Rebuild Foundation and its founder, artist Theaster Gates, who for the last couple decades have transformed disused spaces into “sites of creative production, artistic experimentation, radical hospitality, archival stewardship and land cultivation.” At The Land School, public programming produced by creative partners-in-residence supports Rebuild's mission to expand proximity and access to cultural production on the South Side of Chicago. “What began as a reflection on our relationship to the land became a sonic experiment reflecting blackness in the present moment through hope, rage, protest, and resistance,” says Locks and Zarraga in the album’s co-written liner notes.

What we hear on Dawning is what Locks and D-Composed brought to the auditorium on April 11, 2026: a live performance meant to be “a sound experience that pulls you in and wrings you out.” The recorded document is hard to argue with. From sublime and consonant downbeat grooves to genuinely frightening, dissonant and anxious meltdowns—the six pieces that make up the album cover so much musical ground with such an expert touch that it can be difficult to remember that we’re listening to something that occurred all at once in the same room.