Mathematics and Wu-Tang Clan are making history. The exclusive Record Store Day version of their forthcoming Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman: From the Wu-Tang, the Saga Continues Collection album is being limited to a 5,000-piece vinyl run and is due in stores for the annual event this Saturday, April 12. What makes the release distinctive, though, is that each of the individual vinyl copies of the album contains one-of-one album art. “We’re in a business now of collectables,” says Chris Schwartz, co-founder of Ruffhouse Records—home to Cypress Hill, The Fugees, and Lauryn Hill—and whose Ruffnation Entertainment is distributing the Black Samson LP in conjunction with Virgin Music Group. “Whether it’s a catalog item or a new, cool project like Math’s, you can go and create a whole new audience for it and make something really interesting by offering it as a print variant.”
The idea for the distinctive packaging originated after Schwartz worked with Macroverse’s Mixprint, a multi-format entertainment company best known for its work with comics, in July 2024 to create one-of-one covers of the playbill for Cypress Hill’s performance with the London Symphony Orchestra. Through his work making vinyl versions of RZA’s Bobby Digital projects for Ruffnation, Schwartz had also been working within the Wu-Tang ecosystem. As longtime Wu-Tang show DJ and producer Mathematics was putting the finishing touches on the group’s forthcoming LP, Alan Grunblatt (whose DNA Music Group partnered with Schwartz’s Ruffnation through Virgin) suggested that Mathematics share the album art he’d drawn for the release with Bennett Phillips at Macroverse.
Mathematics gave Phillips his drawings, which depicted his vision of the character and a dragon, both of which are in sync with the kung-fu element of the Wu-Tang Clan’s mystique and which reflected Mathematics’ vision for The Bastard Swordsman. In turn, Phillips delivered Mathematics’ work to Mixprint artist Steven Perkins, who came up with sketches (without using AI) that served as the building blocks for the 5,000 Black Samson album cover variants. “As an artist who understands how other artists are, when somebody has that fire, that idea, you’ve got to let them run with it,” Mathematics says. “When [the initial images] came back, I was very happy—tremendously happy.”
The process was complicated by a few factors, though. For one, making one-of-one artwork had never been done before for an album cover, so Macroverse had to explore its printing options. “We had to reinvent the packaging, because the type of printer that this gets printed on is a $2 million printer,” Phillips says. “It’s bigger than the minivan that my family had, and it’s not designed to print album jackets. But the machines that can print album jackets can’t do the variable printing. Since you can’t teach those printers to do variable printing, you have to redesign the packaging. We recreated it from scratch.”
“As an artist who understands how other artists are, when somebody has that fire, that idea, you’ve got to let them run with it. When the initial images came back, I was tremendously happy.” — Mathematics
Although Mathematics realized that the album art would be a selling point, he’d long been focusing on making what would become Black Samson a noteworthy project on the music front. He aimed to combine the great music and positive messaging he got from Blaxploitation films such as Super Fly with the drama and tension inherent in karate flicks. Thus, several Black Samson songs have the same titles as classic movies within that former genre (“Cleopatra Jones,” “Dolemite”) as well as the latter (“Shaolin vs. Lama,” “Executioners From Shaolin”). “I wanted to make something that was cinematic from beginning to end, a journey that you can travel on,” Mathematics says. “It’s reflective of my growth and where I came from. I also wanted to test the waters.”
In doing so, Black Samson features a bevy of live instrumentation backing the rhymes of Wu-Tang Clan members Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and Inspectah Deck, as well as such featured guests as Kurupt and Benny the Butcher. “I wasn’t surprised or shocked, but when I was looking at the credits, I noticed there were all these musicians on there,” Schwartz says. “I’d always thought of Wu-Tang Clan as more straight hip-hop production, so when I was listening to the album, I was thinking the music was full of samples. But it isn’t. It’s live musicians, and the production is phenomenal. It’s one of the best hip-hop records I’ve heard in a long, long time.”
“I played a lot of stuff, and what I wasn’t good at or wasn’t hitting the mark on, I brought in the musicians,” adds Mathematics. “It all came together because I wasn’t trying to be like anybody else, any other sound out there. I wanted to give you a piece of me, something original.”
As Ruffnation and Virgin Music Group began reaching out to retailers to gauge interest in Black Samson, the response was enthusiastic. Indeed, participating RSD shops purchased the 5,000 vinyl units quickly. Given that each country that participates in Record Store Day is its own organization, and in order to meet the RSD guidelines, each of the 1,000 units of the album sold in the UK say “UK Edition” on the back jacket below the identifying number of the print run. On each of the UK copies, the yellow and black on the central label have also been transposed from the United States version. Black Samson is also slated to have a standard wide release, but that release date has yet to be determined. That standard version of the LP will have a single Blaxploitation-inspired cover.
With a groundbreaking artistic approach and stellar music, Schwartz says that he expects Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman: From the Wu-Tang, the Saga Continues Collection to be an in-demand release among fans. “Wu-Tang has a disproportionate number of what we call ‘completists,’” he says. “Those are the people who buy any- and everything that’s even remotely related to what the group does. This album is a must-have for them.” The creator of the project has a similar feeling. “It seemed like everything fell into place,” Mathematics says. “I really can’t wait for the world to get a hold of it. If you’re buying this, you’re purchasing something that gives you the whole experience. You get the music, the feeling, the personalization of your own album cover.” FL
