Black Lodge is finally releasing MWR157… on Arcola!

I don’t know much about Black Lodge. I learnt a few stuff thanks to this article a few years ago, I know he had a few releases on Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes label, that he’s quite active on Instagram, and that he was the last victim of the Mo’ Wax collapse.

MWR157 was supposed to be the antepenultimate (I could not miss a chance to use this English word) Mo’ Wax release, but never made it past the test pressing step back in 2002, and only two copies are known to exist, which makes it one of the rarest Mo’ Wax records.

Prior to that, Black Lodge had the Horse With No Name / Ha Dili 12″on Mo’ Wax, accompanied by a weird DJ promo with a lots of DJ tools, and maybe the obscure Blood Brass / Gay Boy 7″ housed in hand-made, recycled sleeves but I’m very unsure about this one. Was Mo’ Wax really involved in this record?

Anyway, it’s 2018 and Arcola, the just relaunched sister label to Warp, is releasing a new Black Lodge 12″ simply and delightfully titled MWR157, which includes the original main title Hotline, as well as 5 others tunes from the same era. I love the fact that 3 of them are titled Mo Wax 4 / 5 / 6, and I guess it’s just the way they were labeled on the DATs?

Although the tracks were made more than 15 years ago, the whole EP sounds surprisingly fresh. To be honest, I didn’t really care about Black Lodge’s music back in the day, like most of late Mo’ Wax releases, so it’s good to re-discover it with the (bit more) open mind of a grown man.

MWR157 is now available at Bleep on vinyl only  : https://bleep.com/release/105008-black-lodge-mwr157

By the way, it’s worth mentioning that Black Lodge also has an LP of more unreleased stuff called Bitter Blood, out this month on Disciples