Late summer 2020 we released the EP „Wishing the Clouds Away“ with Dan McRae aka The Hidden. We were surprised to shocked that we got featured in A Closer Listen. A Closer Listen is a very picky blog made by lovely music connaisseurs with a broad taste in music far away from the mainstream: https://acloserlisten.com/2020/08/07/summer-days-wishing-the-clouds-away-with-rocomoco-the-hidden-and-the-cast-of-aviary-bridge/. They also took the artwork of our EP into their Top 10 artworks 2020! In lofi hiphop it is all about vibes, vibes and vibes. Even though we are mostly into instrumentals, we we want to tell stories. Track titles and visuals are a vital part of our our stories told in 2 minutes lofi beats. In the early days lofi hiphop videos started using japanese animes like flipping jazz samples in the SP404. Which all starts back in 2004 with Nuhabes and the soundtrack to Samurai Champloo. When you dive deeper into the lofi hiphop culture nowadays you will see a much wider range of styles in music and in visuals. We always loved the work of the Moscow based artist Abstractjity and asked him to develop a visual concept for the EP by using his cut up collage style. That was January 2020 shortly before the pandemic breakout of the Corona Virus that had an incredible big influence on the mood of all of us this year. So this was our original briefing where we thought that the EP title will come from one of the tracks:
„We are preparing an EP at the moment with the title „far away from everything“. Very chilled and ambient vibes. We have the idea to use seperate layers or/parts of the collage for singles upfront. So this would be a unique way to use your excellent work that matches our look and feel so well.“ But Abstractjity also needed a sujet to create an image so we had a brainstorming in an Insta dm chat and came out with these topics: „Mountains, stars, planets, reading books is never wrong. Clouds and escapism is fine.“
Abstractjity came back with the cover artwork. Bang! A perfect match to the vibe and mood we were looking for and a big inspiration for us, because we were still working on the music. Based on his artwork we also decided to change the title into „Wishing the clouds away“.
rocomoco official website 