Concept for

Fishmans – 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare (Deluxe Edition)

This project is a physical boxset redesign for Fishmans’ legendary final live performance, 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare, recorded at Akasaka Blitz on December 28, 1998 made alongside two colleagues. The core objective of this project is to transform a digital cult phenomenon into a tactile and physical artifact, bridging Tokyo’s late-90s dub and dream-pop scene with contemporary minimalist editorial standards to honor the late Shinji Sato’s musical legacy.

The overarching conceptual foundation of this archival redesign came from an idea of "Dream Stratigraphy", used specifically in the booklet, by approaching the live album as a physical artifact built from overlaid emotional strata the same way geological stratigraphy studies the accumulated layers of soil and rock to reconstruct Earth's distant past. The concert itself exists in the collective memory as a weightless, hallucinatory experience, so the design challenge was to translate that intangible, dream-like quality into a tactile object without flattening its depth.

Visually and materially, this concept is manifested through careful layering and atmospheric transitions. By using shoegaze-inspired color gradients of blue, cyan, and soft magenta over textured archival photography, the project captures the transient atmosphere of the live soundscapes. To physically embody this hallucinatory movement, the cover is made in a lenticular print, creating a shifting effect that transforms the stage photography as the viewer moves the package.

The three 180-gram vinyl discs are pressed on translucent colored vinyl in Deep Cobalt, Magenta, and Clear, echoing the reverb-heavy textures of the music and the visual transition throughout the performance. Enhancing this audio-tactile experience, Side F features a physical locked groove mechanism engraving the final decaying reverb of Long Season into an infinite, repeating loop that endlessly suspends the final moment of the concert. Alongside that, the set also comes with a Moiré-inspired spiral slipmat to put underneath the transparent discs.

The typographic system uses clean, technical sans-serif typography against minimalist grid layouts, alongside a handwritten typeface of the frontman's handwriting. The accompanying booklet combines concert photography with minimalist typography that materializes the dream stratigraphy idea with translucent paper overlays, ensuring that text and blurred concert imagery bleed into one another so the viewer experiences the performance as a series of semi-transparent slices of time. Custom guitar picks using the handwritten typography and signature color gradients serve as tangible souvenirs. Completing the archival set is a vintage-inspired t-shirt featuring a high-contrast screen-print of Shinji Sato performing on the front, while the back displays Sato’s original handwritten setlist serving as an intimate trace of the performance's exact chronology.

Ultimately, the project balances nostalgia with functional contemporary design, ensuring that every material choice from the lenticular movement and locked groove to the translucent vinyl pressings, raw handwritten typography, and layered paper textures works to evoke the feeling of holding a preserved, unearthed piece of music history. Design & Concept: Lúcia Pinho