Home with HIRD + G-PER

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Apr 29, 2004

Today I met up with swedish artist HIRD. After a coffee we went to his studio (Pic 2) to listen to his newly finished album, due for release in Japan in August. Some tracks featured the lovely voice of Yukimi Nagano, mostly famous for her work with swedish duo Koop.

I didn’t get a chance to make up my mind about the album, cause there was so many other interesting things (pic 3) in his messy studio that caught my attention. Like a calender from one of my favourite swedish satire / comic artists; Jan Stenmark (pic 5). I really liked the optimistic message of this one: the guy on the left says “One day we are all gonna die” and the right one goes “All the other days we shall not”

HIRD, or Christoffer, is an active man. He’s currently involved in the preperations for Tokyo Style in Gothenburg, but also one of the artists at Everwanting Streets, another event taking place in Gothenburg.

After meeting Hird and some other people I went home to my friend G-Per who also makes music (I’m eager to hear him record the lyrics for his future hit; working title “Keep on Truckin”) and also has a messy apartment. Both me and G-Per loves the design of the new European Championship in Soccer-cans by Coca-Cola (Pic 1). He also kept telling me that you shouldn’t leave the house unarmed (Pic 4).

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PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition is March 5.

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.

He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.

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Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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