Self-production. The label as an act of rematerialization.

In America's ghettos, the self-produced record is a matter of survival. An acetate cut in a handful of copies, a label printed with whatever could be found, lettering done by hand or typed on a typewriter, an invented name, a catalog number that is often a makeshift invention. Few means, plenty of intent: the graphics are the sound turned into sign, signature, claim. Inner-sourcing, not outsourcing.

This series starts over from there, with one precise gesture: rematerialization. The Sanders acetate, the declared reference for the first Cannonball release, is the textbook case. The model is taken up again, redrawn, put back on the street as a new object that keeps its grammar. Every project is born on paper, with a pen-drawn circle, a hole, notes in the margin, and only afterwards moves to the screen.

Self-production is also the method. Since 2015 the work has grown in full autonomy, with skills built in the field by a self-taught hand, and the curve is plain to the naked eye: from the lit-fuse bomb of the first issues to the clean geometries, from the stripped-to-the-bone gothic of Brotherly to full-page photography. The vocabulary widens, the hand grows steadier, with every release one dares a little more.

For Rare Soul, a collecting niche, the record is first of all a document. Here it is one twice over: it gives back the voice of those who produced themselves, and redraws the type and the texture by hand.