Alexander Kollman, otherwise known by his emcee pseudonym Safari Al is a 20 year old emcee out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He started rapping in the summer of 2010, but recently began seriously pursuing it last year. Up to that point he was rapping under the name Ollie P. Rose, but changed it to Safari Al based off of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs. The current project is his second since his 2011 release, “Hermitage Academy”. This conceptual tape was recorded in the studio of his dear friend Colin, and is loosely inspired of a recent trip to Guatemala on behalf of Engineers Without Borders to build a spring water protection system for a rural village.

“The Highlands EP is a collection of six songs, all loosely inspired by my recent trip to Guatemala via my involvement in Engineers Without Borders. It’s very much rooted in a naturalistic element that pervades the selected instrumentals and song content — a unifying theme of sorts. Given that I was only in Guatemala for around two weeks, it was difficult to make acute inspections about the culture; however, each song tries to examine some facet of myself or the environment or the people of the village where we worked.”