New Mo’ Wax vinyl featuring Rammellzee

OK so that post title sounds very exciting, but I would not say that Mo’ Wax is back, because :

– it’s a Vinyl Factory edition with a Mo’ Wax stamp

– it’s not even music!

However it’s highly enjoyable for geeks like me, probably like you too.

The Vinyl Factory has just announced the release of this new vinyl titled Gothic Futurism in collaboration with Mo’ Wax, limited to 200 copies on white wax, featuring artwork by Ben Drury, and including an interview with Rammellzee (RIP) conducted by Ed Gil in June 1995. A part of this interview is transcripted in the Mo’ Wax book, and was also available to listen in headphones at the Urban Archaeology exhibition at Southbank Centre in June 2014. A Mo’ Wax record with spoken words? This is quite weird indeed, and even though Mo’ Wax has never been about music only, I really hope there will be some unreleased music from the vaults available at some point, because, no doubt, there is A LOT.

The official announcement

Here is the Vinyl Factory presentation about this :

Early graffiti artist and MC Rammellzee has his manifesto for Gothic Futurism pressed to vinyl.

Rammellzee was not so much iconic as iconoclastic. MC, graffiti artist and rebel theorist, he left an indelible mark on early hip-hop and graffiti culture, as the friend and foil to Jean Michel Basquiat, with whom he recorded the seminal and hugely influential ‘Beat Bop’(a highlight of Charlie Ahearn’s film Style Wars). It’s a record that Mo’Wax boss James Lavelle has called “arguably the greatest and most influential rap record of all time”.

But as he describes in this interview, Rammellzee was friend to no-one, a fierce individual who rebelled against the form and meaning of his medium, developing a theory he dubbed Gothic Futurism, which described the battle between letters and their symbolic warfare against any standardizations enforced by the rules of the alphabet.

In this extraordinary, sometimes incendiary and utterly compelling interview, Rammellzee lays out his theory of Gothic Futurism, wind tunnels and how these developed into a new phase of his visual worked, which he called Iconoclast Panzerism.

Conducted by graphic designer and Mo’Wax regular Ed Gill, this essential document is being released for the first time as a limited edition vinyl to coincide with the new exhibition ‘Build & Destroy: Works from the Mo’ Wax Archive’ at the Saatchi Gallery.

As Gill says: “He was pioneering through music and art and came up through a gang culture at exactly the right time – the late 1970′s. He applied his theories to music and visual art and was able to become saturated with both, which made him interesting.”

This record is available to order now from the Vinyl Factory webstore : http://www.vfeditions.com/product/view/210