Breaking News: Mathematics and Wu-Tang Clan Are Making History with Their Record Store Day Edition of Black Samson

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.