Kaede Terauchi is unique in that he has to deal with a very specific circumstance.
In the age when 10,000 hours of skateboarding get uploaded to the internet in a given day, there are very few… skateboard “circumstances” that have no precedent.
Kaede Terauchi’s circumstance is: a lot of people have not seen him skate …dry.
Stick around long enough, and you’ll notice how things happening remind you of things that happened. In Ryuhei Kitazume‘s new part, you might clock the peak-Transworld video style voiceover waxing poetic about the magic of ledges like it’s Kalis talking about Love in ’96, the Y2Kish jump-cut editing reminiscent of The Reason, or the music video that cuts halfway into the part. But Shinpei Ueno and the minds at Tightbooth have always ran this style.
No, the thing reminiscent of another time is that they’re trying to make a skate video feel Big. Or at least Bigger than they’ve felt in a while.
It is safe to say that those of us running skate publications have a high affinity for Rob Taro’s work. His renown Timescan series, which started in 2019, takes a something-out-of-nothing sensibility learned from a childhood in small-town New Jersey, and takes it into the often claustrophobic, high-bust street spots of Japan. Rob’s videos and parts are full of lines connecting opposite sides of the street, mountainous banks with obtuse runways, and cutty nuggets of marble that stick out to only those with a discerning eye for the skateable.
We obvs don’t know every skate crew in the country, but from a mediated standpoint, it’s hard to think of a crew as aggressively productive as Duplex. The fact that they do it all just off Saturdays and Sundays is INSANE. Our buddy Greg Navarro flew down to Florida to tag along with them and document how it all gets done for Thrasher‘s new “Lifers” series.
Bronze 56k dropped an edit to push their NB# shoe, starring Jordan Trahan, Shaun Paul and Marcello Campanello — with a cameo by the venerable William McFeely. Huge year for hitting Flushing in the snow.
The South Beach Macy’s ledge ranks as something that — despite walking past it every Miami trip ever — we’re perfectly ok never skating. But Zoogie and the crew always get the most out of this innocuous high, beveled ledge with no end. Wolff’s ender is dope.
Last month’s all-Tokyo Yuto part (already platinum!) put a bright light on one of the most hidden-in-plain-sight skateboard secrets: that skating in one of the world’s greatest skate cities is profoundly hard. (It’s kinda like when your crew does its first-ever L.A. trip and realizes the place isn’t one perfect schoolyard after another, like the videos had lead you to believe.)
Despite the odds stacked against street skating in Japan’s capital, the place continues to produce incredible skaters and videos. And today, we’re happy to present Kenta Okamoto‘s Peace N Love4, the latest in a series of largely nocturnal Tokyo videos that him and his crew have been putting out since 2020.
