Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware will release a ten-disc limited edition box set of their work as The Clarke & Ware Experiment.
Out via Mute on November 26, the collection, House Of Illustrious, will contain both of their studio albums, 1999’s Pretentious and 2001’s Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, along side eight – yup – discs of unreleased material. There are only 1,000 copies mind, individually numbered and signed by the artists, and it will only be available through its official website, here.
Limited to 1,000 copies – numbered and signed by the artists – House of Illustrious is available exclusively from http://www.clarkewareboxset.com and is released on 26 November 2012.
The packaging design has been a long time coming – 18 months in fact – and it shows; it’s infrequent that a box set is described as "purpose-tooled" – have a look at the artwork above. The collaborative effort of Ware, Malcolm Garrett, whose previous credits include Duran Duran, Magazine and Peter Gabriel, and Tim Milne of Artomatic.
Says Ware: "The original challenge of how to package ten CDs and accompanying information into a single desirable object has been achieved through beautiful and subtle graphic design of the CDs themselves, combined with bespoke acrylic ‘hockey pucks’ as they became affectionately referred to, enabled the CDs themselves to become the artistic component, together with the purpose-tooled stainless steel spindle (etched with ‘Made In Sheffield’).”
Here’s the album trailer:
