Some collaborations are planned.
Some collaborations are planned.
Others feel like they were already waiting somewhere in the dark, long before the people involved ever crossed paths.
This one was the latter.
For this special edition, we had the honor of collaborating with Oz; an extraordinary photographer and visual artist who lived in Basel with his family for several years after spending much of his life working all over the world.
We first met him through Valérie from Basel Happens, where he had the honor to capture us.
At the beginning, our idea to take pics sounded simple enough. Meet somewhere in the city. Maybe take some pictures near the Music Wall of Fame in Basel. Music. Pedals. A natural connection.
But Oz does not create images the easy way.
Presence, Emotion, Truth
He is not interested in simply placing an object in front of a visually fitting background and documenting it beautifully. His work is about something far more difficult to capture.
Presence, emotion, truth: the invisible tension inside a fleeting second.
He captures the soul of a moment, not just its appearance.
And immediately, this felt deeply familiar to us because this is exactly how we think about sound.
A truly great pedal does not simply “improve” your tone. It becomes part of the interaction between player and instrument, reacting to touch, dynamics, aggression, restraint, and imperfections. Instead of flattening personality, it reveals it.
So instead of creating a classic product shoot, we decided to create something honest together.
And somehow, everything unfolded exactly the way it was supposed to.
Why Shodhana
For this limited edition, we chose the Shodhana.
At first, the reason was almost absurdly practical. With only two knobs, the pedal simply offered more visual space for artwork. As we would say in German: “Es war praktisch.”
But later, it felt impossible that this was merely coincidence.
Because the artwork itself came from a moment that no one could ever have designed intentionally.
Oz had traveled to Paris to photograph a Belarusian artist. But when he arrived, her apartment turned out to be too small for the shoot. She happened to be cat sitting somewhere else and needed to feed the cat anyway, so they spontaneously moved the session there instead.
And then reality shifted.
The Cat
The moment the flashes started firing, the cat completely took over the room.
He kept stepping into the frame, reacting to the light, watching the lens, moving through the atmosphere as if he understood that something irreversible was happening.
Almost as if the session had secretly always belonged to him.
Originally, the photograph still showed the model.
But none of it mattered anymore.
The cat’s eyes consumed the image.
So Oz removed everything else.
And what remained was no longer just a photograph.
It became a presence. A frozen fragment of something alive.
Not staged, repeatable, or reproducible.
Just one impossible moment that revealed itself for a fraction of a second before disappearing forever.
That is what Oz captured.
Catana
And somehow, without realizing it at first, it became the perfect visual embodiment of Shodhana.
Because Shodhana cuts like a Katana through chaos.
Not to sterilize sound. Not to control it. But to reveal what lived hidden inside it all along.
The essential. The emotional weight. The human fingerprint behind the notes.
Just like the photograph.
Out of unpredictability emerged clarity, out of chaos emerged focus, and out of coincidence emerged soul.
And maybe that is what art actually is: not forcing meaning into the world, but recognizing the rare moments where meaning reveals itself on its own, and having the sensitivity to capture it before it disappears.
Oz Tabib Portfolio
Oz Tabib Prints
