Tokumaru Shugo

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Apr 29, 2004

Trevor, in town recently and the special guest at last week’s Tokyo Fun Party, runs an indie label from New York called Music Related. The next release is from Tokyo native Tokumaru Shugo, an album called NIGHT PIECE. If you go here, you can download an MP3 preview mix of the album, which I’ve ended up listening to 3-4 times. The official release is May 11, but you can pre-order the album now (which I’ve done) for 8$. Can’t wait for it to get here so I can listen to the whole thing.

“On Shugo Tokumaru’s “Night Piece, ” the 23-year old Tokyo native bends the most gentle and familiar pop sounds into a bittersweet backroad journey through a dreamy, imaginary countryside. The instruments are often conventional, but the sound never strays from surprise and bewilderment: Acoustic guitars are almost never strummed, but pluck out exact rhythms and slide from note to note in amazing melodies. Shugo can conjure up the ghosts of bygone Brian Wilson-summers one second only to turn the corner into the best Southern road-movie ever. Even when he stumbles into experimental territory with psychedelic drones, super-fast guitar licks, and jarring backwards-riffs, he retains a quiet honesty. Nothing is forced or “show-off”: “Night Piece” is merely the beautiful pop that flows through Shugo Tokumaru’s world.”

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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 happens June 4.

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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.

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