VF releases Robert Hood’s score to Arthur Jafa’s APEX on vinyl
Music and art world behemoths collide on APEX.
The Vinyl Factory has announced the release of APEX, a collaboration between filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa and Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, available now as a limited vinyl edition.
Originally conceived in 2013 and currently showing at 180 Studios’ Paradigm Shift exhibition, APEX is Jafa’s visceral montage of 841 still and moving images drawn from cinema, music, news and personal archive. Images surge past, interweaving figures like Mickey Mouse, Tupac Shakur, and Sojourner Truth, as well as scenes of violence, spiritual iconography, and science fiction elements into a stroboscopic montage.
Set to Hood’s stark, driving techno score, rhythm, rather than narrative, drives what the work asks us to feel.
Jafa has described APEX as “Black Visual Intonation,” an experiment in translating the intensity of Black musical expression into moving images. In his words, it’s “a model for both a film—a $100 million sci-fi epic—and as a kind of pre- or anti-cinema.”
A founding member of Underground Resistance alongside Jeff Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks, Robert Hood helped define the political and spiritual core of Detroit techno in the early ’90s. After leaving the collective, he founded his own label, M-Plant, developing the meditative sound that would come to define minimal techno.
Presented for the first time on vinyl, APEX transforms from a gallery installation into home listening experience. It is pressed on 180-gram black vinyl and housed in a sleeve designed by Jafa.
1000 hand-numbered copies are available now via The Vinyl Factory online store.
