Devon Turnbull’s Oto no Kagu Furniture

A decent record, a proper chair and nowhere else to be. With Oto no Kagu, the OJAS founder considers what happens around the speakers.

At some point, listening to music became something we did while answering emails. An extraordinary arrangement. Somebody spends three years making a record, ruins a relationship, argues with a drummer, and we give it roughly the same attention as the dishwasher. I’m guilty of it too. There is usually something playing. Whether I’m actually listening is another question.

Devon Turnbull has built a practice around giving music a better chance. Through OJAS, he makes sound systems and listening environments that ask you to sit down and spend some time. His latest project supplies the seat.

Oto no Kagu By OJAS and Karimoku Furniture brings his approach to audio into a collection of chairs, shelving, tables and acoustic panels, developed with the Japanese furniture manufacturer. Once you’ve considered the speakers, the equipment and the records, there is still the small matter of where to put yourself. Preferably somewhere you want to stay.

Turnbull arrived at furniture by a route that makes sense if you’ve ever followed an interest well beyond the point where it became financially sensible. OJAS began as his creative alias across graffiti, music, graphics and clothing. In 2003, he co-founded Nom de Guerre. While working in fashion, he kept building audio equipment, developing the sound systems that would eventually become his main pursuit. His account of that history centres on years of experimentation. I like that part. The thing you keep doing while you’re supposed to be doing something else has a habit of telling on you.

Furniture had been there too. In Alice Morby’s recent Hypebeast interview, Turnbull describes collecting since high school. Eames and Bertoia came early; pieces by Poul Kjærholm, Hans Wegner and Jean Prouvé followed. He had wanted to design seating for years. Living with furniture is a useful education. Eventually, you discover which chair everybody fights over and which one holds a jacket for six months. The jacket chair may photograph beautifully.

Oto no Kagu began with a chair Turnbull designed for the 2021 exhibition Not For Sale. The idea grew out of Karimoku Research’s Survey 03: Form Follows Feelings and expanded into a wider collection. Fifteen products launched on 22 October 2026, in Pure Oak and Pewter Gray. Karimoku’s announcement

The connection to his speakers is in the construction: planes, proportions, and geometry reconsidered around a body. Looking through the collection, you can follow that thinking from the chairs to the shelving and screens. There’s a directness to it that appeals to me. Broad surfaces. Open bases. Enough repetition for the pieces to belong together without making the room feel like somebody ordered the entire page.

As a photographer, I’m interested in what happens after the clean installation shot. A room can look magnificent before anyone has attempted to live in it. Then the records come out, somebody needs somewhere to put a glass, and the furniture begins its actual interview. That’s the part I’d want to see here. How do you settle into the chair? What stays within reach? Do you put on another record because you’re comfortable, or get up halfway through because your back has lodged a complaint? These are fairly ordinary questions. They’re also the ones that decide whether an object becomes part of your life.

Karimoku brings considerable experience to that territory. Its origins go back to a woodworking shop established in Kariya, Aichi, in 1940, with its own wooden furniture following in the 1960s. Turnbull brings a practice shaped partly by his encounters with Japan’s artisanal audio culture. The partnership gives his ideas access to people who understand what wood will tolerate once drawings become objects.

Wood, like most worthwhile collaborators, has opinions. Their earlier exhibition, Between Space & Sound, explored listening through the Japanese concept of ma, considering relationships across space and time. Karimoku Research framed the project around the meeting of acoustic philosophy and the spaces we inhabit. You can take that into quite a theoretical conversation. I keep coming back to the evening itself. You’ve finished what you needed to do. There’s a record you haven’t heard properly in years. You take it out, put it on and sit down. The room either helps that happen or gives you six reasons to get up again.

Turnbull’s furniture enters at that level. It gives the equipment a place, the listener a seat and the activity some room. The acoustic panels extend the consideration to the sound moving through the space. Of course, a beautiful chair cannot cure a short attention span. Mine has survived several respectable pieces of furniture. And there’s an obvious question around any expensive listening setup: how much equipment do you need before you allow yourself to enjoy a record? I’d hope the answer remains very little. People have had life-altering encounters with music through terrible car speakers. The song still has to do its share of the work.

What interests me about Oto no Kagu is the attention given to the circumstances. Someone has considered the whole experience, including the human being parked in front of the system. You can appreciate that thinking without planning to replace your living room.

For now, you can see the collection at Shadow, Light & Sound, a listening-room installation at The Conran Shop Daikanyama in Tokyo. Running until 29 December 2026, it brings the furniture together with OJAS Tokyo speakers and pieces from wagetsu, Karimoku’s collaboration with WAKA WAKA. The exhibition details are here.

I haven’t sat in these chairs or heard this installation. That experience still has to answer the questions a photograph can’t. But I like the invitation. Put something on. Find a comfortable position. Give the person who made the record a fighting chance. The emails will manage another twenty minutes.