It’s a collaboration with Fred Perry (MY) and Room Circle. I created (Room Circle) this collective and have worked on the brief from the beginning and “Botanika” is our first project. As you know, this is a concept album compilation inspired from 70’s Japanese act that is Takashi KokuboTakashi Kokubo (小久保 隆) – Oasis Of The Wind II . A Story Of Forest And Water (1993) & Hiroshi Yoshimura (1986) Green. We always wanted to create a full concept album and compile songs that align with the whole concept. The process started with a brief, figuring out all of the waypoints that we can absorb from these two inspirations, also studying their history of it’s graphic representation. We decided to go with physical release in order to test the effectiveness of the possible solutions – from the album covers to the whole physical concept, from digital to print and from the compatible audio files to CD format. The whole process brought us to the structure of nature in order to propose music algorithms that facilitates it’s functioning both for the local scenes and community. We think that compilation is a great approach to have documentation about the artist and the song. We always find it hard to find the resources of good music in the 70s-80s because we lack the documentation itself and also we think that this approach is good for anyone that needs an introduction on how our local music scene looks like. We want the experience of brainstorming the ideas together and decide the concept that we’re looking for and to do every small process like folding the inlay even after going through a lot of trials for the printing process. We got a lot of rejected prints during our process of making this compilation but the whole trial and error process sort of built up the new ideas together.

[Album Artwork] The orange colour reflects the symbolism of warm, sunshine and tropics. We decided the mood of this album will be suitable for evening drive, after work scenery even if you’re stuck in the traffic you are still able to embrace the feeling of warmth and joy. The posture of the talent leads to the willingness and inspiration from Guatama Buddha depicted teaching in the lotus position. We want to deliver the same energy without making it look similar to lotus position. The plants just carry their own characteristic and symbolism for the whole album as a nature viewpoint. Designed by Najmi Arifin, Creative Director of Room Circle