I’ll be honest, I haven’t been excited about any music coming out of Japan in quite a while, but as I mentioned in that quick post on the new episode of Codex, I am absolutely in love with the new album by Salyu (using the name “Salyu x Salyu”), s(o)un(d)beams, produced by Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada). It’s basically like getting a new Cornelius record, but an inspired one (something I did not feel with 2006′s Sensuous). 

Above is a video for the first single from the album, but even better is to experience it using the Chrome Music Mixer (and here’s another video that sort of replicates the same effect). There’s also an iPhone app music visualizer based on the album.

Not that it’s really worth mentioning, but I updated my Cafe Pause mini-site, taking away the blog and simply keeping it as an info page — basically, somewhere to link to when I mention the cafe in a post (since the cafe’s own site is in Japanese). I used the lovely illustration Luis created for the Cafe Pause Poster series as the header.

And let me take this opportunity to clear up a few things, as a lot of people seem to be confused by my relationship with Cafe Pause. No, I am not the owner of the cafe, I’m just good friends with the owner and staff, which is why I’ve been able to produce events and host PauseTalk there. I was managing the gallery space, but don’t really do so anymore — although I’ll still help out if a foreigner wants to rent out the space for a show.

I gotta say I’m getting a kick out of this: In the past 24 hours I conceived of a site, a name, bought the domain, got it working, installed WordPress, imported posts from this site, found a theme that I modded to my liking, and have now launched my latest project, something I’m calling The Magaziner. What’s a magaziner you ask? Here’s my made-up answer:

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.

It all started last night when I was reading a comment on Facebook by Craig Mod, who suggested that all of the magazine-related coverage I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is getting lost within the rest of what I post here. I think he made a good point — and god knows I have a lot of respect and admiration for what he’s accomplished over the past year or so — and so I decided to launch a new site that would be exclusively for all of the magazine stuff. Expect the same kind of coverage you’ve been seeing here — commentary, news, new release announcements, reviews — that weighs heavily on the emerging digital side of the magazine publishing industry, something I’m quite passionate about (although I do still love my lovely print publications, thank you very much).

So this site returns to being a hub for news on me and all of my various projects, which on top of The Magaziner includes Codex, my new weekly music podcast, Radio OK Fred, SNOW Magazine, PauseTalk, and other fun stuff. Hope you’ll continue to follow what I’m up to here, and if you really enjoyed the magazine coverage, then please head on over to The Magaziner — and you can of course subscribe to an RSS feed. There’s a Twitter account too (@the_magaziner) that I’ll be using to post magazine-related news as well.

Oh, and one more thing about The Magaziner, please consider this a beta version of the site. As I said at the top of this post, it all came together rather fast, so over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll be changing things here and there, fixing things I missed, and maybe coming up with new features or sections to add.

Last night I decided to put together a quick and dirty website for Codex — as you’ll probably notice, it’s a simple mod of the SNOW Magazine site. Should make it easier to keep up with what’s going on with the show, instead of having to search for appropriate posts here.

Also, I already have my playlist decided for the next episode (03), but trying to be patient and wait a week before recording it.

Been meaning to mention this for a while now, but a few weeks ago EGM launched a Facebook app version of their weekly digital-only EGMi. The magazine itself hasn’t changed at all, it’s just a way to have it live inside Facebook — you can pop it out as you can on EGMi’s regular site.

What I’m really still waiting for is the release of the iPad edition, which is still only listed as “coming soon.” But from recent editorials, it does sound like a release may actually be just around the corner.

The following video shows off a proof of concept for an upcoming web-based digital hip-hop magazine formatted for iPad called Hoodgrown Digital — notice anything familiar? It’s rather shocking how clearly they have ripped off Flipboard for the main interface, right down to the exact placement of selections. Even worse, this is being sold as a new platform, called Tablazines. Via @twitsplosion

Over at Magtastic Blogsplosion, Andrew goes over a few examples of magazines that have been produced using blog content — mentioned are of course Michael Bojkowski’s Lineread and Jeremy Leslie’s magCulture.com/PAPER (pictured). Although not mentioned, It’s Nice That is another great example of this — and hey, issue 4 just came out.

It’s certainly a proposition that makes sense — as Andrew lays out, with print-on-demand services taking care of printing and distribution, all a budding magazine creator needs these days are the words and the design, and a good blog can take care of the former (with a bit of reformatting, expansion, etc.) It’s definitely something that comes to mind when I think of SNOW Magazine, and what I could do to expand on the site.

And while I mention Andrew’s Stranded, you should also drop by the Magtastic Blogsplosion for his interview with Ivan Pope, the founder of the new online indie magazine shop, Magazero. Pope is a vet of the net and magazine scene, and the inventory he’s building (and it’s still expanding) is already quite impressive.

Yesterday I launched a special blog for the SNOW Magazine Cafe. For those of you who are unable to attend the event here in Tokyo, that’s where you’ll find more details about the show — I’ll be posting stuff throughout the month, including photos and the like. Today I revealed the list of participating titles (in the main part of the show), 33 in all. Note that you can subscribe to a feed as well.

I don’t have an iPad — YET — but big thanks to Paul Baron for sending in this screenshot of how SNOW Magazine looks like on the iPad. Although I didn’t think there’d be any problems — since it works fine on iPhone — it’s alway good to have confirmation. Now to start thinking about whatever else SNOW-related I can get on the iPhone/iPad…

No, it wasn’t an April Fools prank, SNOW Magazine really has gone all white. I thought April 1 was a good day to do it because in Japan it also marks the start of the year for many (new school year, start of new recruits in companies) and so why not do it then. Longterm readers may also remember that I used to like switching color schemes on my site on a fairly regular basis. But also, when SNOW launched at the end of January, I did see it more as a 0.9 version of the site, and I still wanted to mess around with it a bit post-launch.

Thinking about it now, I think my first instinct was probably to go white, but I forced using colors because I didn’t want to come off as a sort of clone of this site (which I revamped last fall) and my GAME site. But in the end, I think it’s really what I wanted for the site, something very minimal, and I think it suits the logo even more.

If you follow my Twitter feed, then you may have noticed all of the tweeting I was doing while in Kyoto this past weekend, and more importantly, adding the @hitotoki tag to all of those tweets. The reason is that I’m currently helping with the beta testing of the soon-to-relaunch Hitotoki, and as you can see, it now revolves around a strong Twitter component. I’ll just leave it at that for now, but if you want to be alerted when the site relaunches, you can sign up on the site, and follow them on Twitter as well.

So here we are, almost a week since the launch of SNOW Magazine. How have things been? Well, it was a bit of a rough ride for the first couple of days, mostly because I wasn’t happy with the way I had set up the domain (a lot of people will recall that you could only see “http://snow-mag.com” in the URL bar no matter the post, because I was just using forwarding/masking), and so I struggled a bit with this, but I can’t thank enough the man who always comes to my rescue when it comes to web-related problems, Patrick Benny (he’s helped countless times on this site as well). Do check out Patrick’s first column for SNOW as well, covering the launch of Yasuharu Konishi’s new label, READYMADE V.I.C.

So I think things should be running relatively smoothly from here on out, although do continue sending feedback if you encounter weirdness. The feed should also be working fine, so please subscribe to make sure not to miss any new content.

Also, here’s a quick list of the recent posts that went up on the site, in case you missed anything.

• Painting the Holy Mountain: Kiyoto Maruyama
• Interview with Tokachi Tsuchiya
• Jalan’s Latest Commercial
• READYMADE V.I.C.
• iPad in Japan
• Lotta
• TAB Needs Your Help
• Better Luck Next Tie
• House in Obama
• 51 Japanese Characters for iPhone
• The Unlikely Restaurater

As we’ve seen with many a site and company, 2009 was a very rough year, and our dear Tokyo Art Beat — itself a non-profit — was hit as well. So if you can, PLEASE help TAB keep going by making a donation here. PLEASE!

MUJI posts a beautiful flash-based essay — mixing visuals and text — on its global site, explaining the rationale behind the company’s line of products.