Mo’ Wax — Where Are They Now: Black Lodge (2001)
Mo’ Wax was a record label started by James Lavelle in 1992, which closed about ten years later. Initially they released 12" singles and licensed a compilation from Japan of Japanese Hip Hop, until 1994 when they began releasing albums of their artists original work. While some of these artists such as DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, and Money Mark continued releasing music after Mo’ Wax closed, others have seemingly disappeared from the music scene. In this series I will look at each artist on Mo’ Wax and try to find out where are they now…
Black Lodge is the alias of Daniel Dwayre, a musician and visual artist from Manchester who received a resurgence of interested in 2018 when much of his back catalogue saw reissue. Some of his early credits include creating the cover art for Autchre’s Incunabula album in 1993, and he also collaborated in Gescom’s first EP in 1994, a collective including the members of Autchre. But he is best known for his musical output under the name Black Lodge.
The first Black Lodge releases arrived in 1999 when the Untitled and Black Lodge Editions Volume 2 singles were both released on a record label named Acupuncture. Untitled also appeared on the Real Fidelity compilation in 2000 where they described it as an “In demand disco based club cut”, and the track was also praised by Dazed & Confused (February 2002) where they credited Untitled as causing Black Lodge to become “a much-talked-about, but little-actually-known-about dance music name over night.”
2000 saw Black Lodge remix Badly Drawn Boy’s Disillusion and 10¢’s Red Rubber Ball, and that same year Black Lodge made their Mo’ Wax debut via a Mo’ Wax compilation in the Japanese magazine Relax. The compilation debuted Black Lodge’s Horse With No Name which sampled Danish band Laid Back from their 1983 song White Horse, and by 2003 the songs credits had changed to solely crediting members of Danish band Laid Back as writers of Horse With No Name.
In 2001 Mo’ Wax released two version of a Horse With No Name 12", with Mo’ Wax explaining at the time:
Another ‘Horse With No Name’ 12" is out there already but limited to just 1,000 copies. The difference? No ‘Ha Dili’ on the flip but an array of DJ battlebreaks instead; battlebreaks a little different from the norm and ones that have kept everyone from the DMC boys to the Whitby working mans club very happy indeed.
The DJ battlebreaks version was released as a promo, with the 12" proper arriving in October 2001 and replacing the breaks with a new B-side, Ha Dili.
The next Black Lodge release Blood Brass / Gay Boy arrived in 2002, and was described by Black Lodge as, “An unofficial Mo Wax release. We could not get clearance but released anyway.” The records were housed in sleeves sourced from charity shops and featured the Black Lodge logo stamped over the old artwork, as well as contact details for Mo’ Wax and Black Lodge’s Lodgewars website.
A further single Hotline was also intended for release on Mo’ Wax sometime between 2000–2003 but it was held back for reasons no one can since remember, and apart from a test pressing and promo CD it remained unreleased. Only two copies of the 12" test pressing are known to exist, but one lucky owner wrote about their copy of the CD which alongside Hotline featured a second song called Baby as the B-side. Baby is described by them as a “dancehall number…with a baby (possibly several babies) providing the vocals.” Hotline and Baby remained unreleased, as did an album which had been teased for a 2002 release in Dazed & Confused’s February 2002 issue. Although an album was reportedly handed into Mo’ Wax, it was said to have been rejected due to there being too many samples that needed to be cleared, and then Mo’ Wax had closed down by 2003.
In issue #3 of the zine Safe Crackers Matthias Connor, aka Wolfboy, writes about a musician from Manchester who signed to “a fashionable record label in London” which went bust before an album was delievered. An extract was posted on Black Lodge’s blog in 2008 and while the name of the musician is redacted, it seems clear that it is talking about Black Lodge. From the history of working with the NBCS graffiti crew, to releasing two singles before being signed to a major label, it gives a fantastic overview of his career, including why an album was never released on Mo’ Wax:
*** once had an album deal with a fashionable record label in London…Two years after signing the album deal the label grew concerned over their artist in Manchester’s progress...There was certain unevenness in ***’s music that made it sound homemade…such as the fact that none of the samples in the records had been cleared…This character attracted the record companies in the first place but as soon as he signed they set about trying to change him…They asked him if he could make the same music but without the samples…Eventually when the record company went bust they stopped trying to get in touch with him altogether.
It wasn’t until 2010 that a Black Lodge album finally arrived, with two albums, Kings Arms Sessions Vol.1 and Vol. 2, released on The Trilogy Tapes, a record label run by Will Bankhead who had also previously worked for Mo’ Wax. These were unrelated to Black Lodge’s previous work, and were new recordings from sessions held at The Kings Arms pub in Salford, described by Black Lodge as “how I always wanted to make music…99% analogue, live takes, straight to tape, improvised.”
The two Kings Arms Sessions were released as limited cassettes, and in 2018 a third and final volume was released on Disciples, a sublabel of Warp Records, with several other archival pieces from Black Lodge also released that year, including some from his time on Mo’ Wax.
Arcola, another Warp sublabel, released MWR157 exclusively on vinyl in a limited pressing in 2018, with the title referencing Hotline’s original Mo’ Wax catalogue number. The new 12" featured six songs from Black Lodge’s Mo’ Wax era, including previously promo-only Hotline, while the other songs from the 12" are titled Mo Wax 4, Monte, Mo Wax 5, Mo Wax 6, and Microphone Demo01, and were described by Arcola as:
Six lost slices of leftfield electro including the mythical and mysterious ‘Hotline’…alongside five other tracks that take in dancehall, hip-hop and 2-step garage, all recorded during the same session…It’s a peak time slice of electro madness that carries all the cheeky swagger of many a Mo’Wax banger back in the daze.
Interestingly Mo Wax 5 is said to have been “originally recorded for a crew of US hip-hop MC’s”, which was presumably Quannum who were part of Mo’ Wax at the same time Black Lodge was joining the label. Martin Desai was previously credited as mixing releases from both Quannum and Black Lodge, so there is a link, but ultimately is only an assumption on my part.
Following the release of MWR157, Black Lodge began releasing archived material to his Bandcamp page, and among the rarities was an unreleased remix of Gramme’s Cheeky Cheeky, with Black Lodge adding, “As far as I know James Lavelle (Mo Wax) has the only phyical of this as he had a dub plate pressed.” Horse With No Name and Blood Brass was also added in 2019, and Black Lodge commented that the former was “The nearest I got to being popular.”
In October 2020 Black Lodge took to his Bandcamp page to thank his fans for their love and mention new projects, and through 2020 several new paintings by Black Lodge were made available at ‘Kin Art Gallery in Manchester. Looking forward, Black Lodge has announced a new album will be available in the summer, describing it as “the album I always wanted to make and #mowax wanted me to make”.
