At an exclusive event held in a secret London location, PMC loudspeakers were centre stage for the playback of Wu-Tang Clan’s album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the most expensive album in the world. It was a rare opportunity for a select group to hear the album sounding exactly as it did when originally recorded and mixed using PMC MB2 XBD speakers.
The album, produced in 2015 with only one copy, was sold to a then-mystery private collector for a reported $2m. It was recorded and mixed using PMC MB2 XBD speakers at a studio on Staten Island, New York, and is a retrospective soundscape that threads 31 songs, skits and stories into a 128-minute aural screenplay. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is the last album to include contributions by the entire surviving Wu-Tang Clan. The one-off album was envisioned as both a work of art and an audio artefact that is presented in an exclusive hand-carved nickel-silver box and was supplied with a one-off pair of MB2 XBD speakers, made specifically to be sold with the album.
Notoriously linked to disgraced pharmaceuticals boss Martin Shkreli, the original purchaser, the US government seized the artwork to partially satisfy a forfeiture when Shkreli was convicted for fraud. It was sold to Pleasr (FKA PleasrDAO), an NFT collective, for an alleged $4m in 2021 and is now safely held in a vault in New York. As part of its purchase, Pleasr announced its intention to somehow make the album more widely available, despite Wu-Tang Clan’s condition of sale that the buyer must agree not to release any of the album content or artwork to the public for a period of 88 years.
Co-creator of the album with Wu-Tang Clan’s Robert “The RZA” Diggs, Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh was present at the London playback to assist with the proceedings and talk about the creation of this infamous artwork. Two security officers stood guard over the precious hand-tooled silver box, while a representative of Pleasr – the only person permitted to touch the box – removed the CD to play it to the audience of Pleasr affiliates and members. All mobile phones and recording devices were confiscated for the duration of the event.
Pleasr insisted that the album had to be played back using MB2 XBD-As to present the artwork as a complete piece in its purest form. As RZA said at the time of the original sale, “In order to curate the experience of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for the collector, we decided to have two PMC MB2-XBD speakers included with the album. These speakers were used during production and mastering and distil this work into its purest form, and in sculpting each beat, each frequency and each flash of feeling, they are themselves a work of artistry.”
