RARE WAREZ ARCHIVE / 001 NEO4IC × BILLAIN: EVA UNIT-01

Released February 2020 · Limited to 100 pieces · Sold out
Link to Music Video by Billain
Link to Soundcloud track

Over the past seven years, we’ve released pieces with stories that deserve more time than a launch announcement. The relationships behind them, the details that challenged us, the problems needing to be solved to pull it off, the music that accompanied them, and the people who were there when they first arrived...people apart of the Neo4ic community. 

RARE WAREZ ARCHIVE is where we return to those stories. 

For our first entry, we’re revisiting a collaboration that brought some of our favorite elements together. 

In February 2020, we released our second Neon Genesis Evangelion tribute through NEO4IC: an EVA Unit-01 shirt created with my friend, Billain.

Many of you know Billain through his incredibly intricate, highly technical neurofunk productions. Our friendship and creative history go back to my previous clothing brand, Damascus, where we collaborated on several shirts. When we decided to work together again under NEO4IC, this release became another chapter in a relationship that had already stretched across years of music and art.

Billain created the front illustration and custom typography himself. The spine artwork on the back was something he and built out with our own vectors and icons.

We brought the artwork to life with this reflective ink and neon UV-reactive red, including the red eyes on the front and the red detailing on the back.

One of the most demanding parts of the shirt was also one of its simplest-looking details: the white bars lining the bottom hem.

Because the shirts varied in length and proportions across sizes, those bars couldn’t simply share the placement of the main artwork. Keeping them positioned along the bottom hem required separate placements and two additional print runs across the entire edition: one for the front bars and another for the back.

That was on top of printing the front, back, and sleeve designs. A detail you might notice for only a moment meant putting every shirt back through the press twice more. It’s one of the reasons this piece still stands out to me.

The collaboration also had its own soundtrack. Billain produced an original track and a ten-minute music video featuring custom Evangelion visuals to accompany the shirt. We released the track on NEO4IC’s SoundCloud as an official Billain release, bringing his music and our shared visual work into the same project.

Only 100 shirts were produced. The edition sold out, and it will remain limited to those original 100 pieces.

To everyone who picked one up when it first released: thank you. You supported a collaboration between two friends and gave this particular piece of our history a place in your own life. We are still deeply honored by that.

And to everyone who still has theirs, we want you to know that we remember this shirt. We remember what went into it, why it mattered to us, and the people who showed up for it.

That’s part of why we’re opening the archive. We want you to know the story behind what you own, and we want to recognize your place in it.

Still have yours? Tell us in the comments or tag us in a photo. We’d love to see where these pieces have traveled since 2020.

With gratitude,
Nate Khouli
Founder, NEO4IC