Pikachu (drums, vocals) and Oni (guitar, vocals). Two Osakan girls with penchants for red, Africa, catchy melodies, free noise, volume, improvisation, call-and-response vocals and jumping. Since forming in ’02 they’ve toured and collaborated with the likes of Acid Mothers Temple, Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Yoko Ono and Keiji Haino as well as recorded nine albums and temporarily disappeared into the Cameroonian jungle to live with Pygmy tribespeople [read more]

After graduating from Bunka Fashion College in Knit Design, Keiichi Muramatsu worked for Italian yarn manufacturer Lineapiu. He returned to Japan and founded Everlasting Sprout with Noriko Seki in 2005. With a focus on colour, texture and layering, their unbridled imagination and optimism makes their spun yarn creations utterly free of cynicism. As Muramatsu, says, ‘We want to produce things with the sense of reaching toward hope like sprouts grow toward sunlight’ [read more]

Paramodal installations are like dioramas gone wild; with electric blue plastic railway worlds, biddy mountain goats and mini-lorries snuggling alongside sarariimen at a sushi bar, obachan scrubbing down in onsens and kawaii kids galore in a school gym [read more]

“Small changes in point of view can lead to big changes in consciousness. I think this is the role of photography and it’s what makes photography interesting.”

Naoki Honjo’s parochial birds-eye landscapes and cityscapes appear at once familiar and removed, simple and disorienting, real and fake. The Tokyo-based photographer ingeniously manipulates lighting, scale, perspective, focus and colour to invoke a sense of small-scale falseness about the environments we live in [read more]

Meet Takeshi Hamada’s pet tiger. The type designer and art director founded the e-magazine as a project back in his student days. Since 2000 it has existed as a platform for visual experimentation with the only restriction being the dimensions of the virtual ‘pages’. Luckily for us, all back issues are archived on tiger.org, making for a mouth-watering buffet of utterly original graphic design, illustration, page layout and photography [read more]

Get your geometry sets out: function follows form in these sculptural garments by Anrealage. With utter disregard for the contours of the human body, designer Kunihiko Morinaga has based his last few seasons on the most elemental of shapes: spheres, cubes and pyramids [read more]

Formed in 1978, Yellow Magic Orchestra exerted a huge influence on the electronic musical landscape of the late 70’s and early 80’s, and they continue to be a reference point for many contemporary artists [read more]