Gentemstick’s XY 26-27 merges snowboarding grace with sonic design

The discovery of Japan’s snow surfing movement reconnected designer Devon Ojas with the world she’d left behind. At seventeen, she’d abandoned high school for Washington State, chasing snowboarding and sound engineering in equal measure: days lost to powder and backcountry flow, nights spent recording music and studying audio. By the late nineties, the industry had shifted beneath her; the soulful, meditative discipline of free riding had given way to sponsored acrobatics. She stepped away from the mountains entirely, pouring herself into sound, art and design instead.

Then she found Taro Tamai’s work. The Japanese snow surfer’s approach to backcountry riding and groomed descents embodied exactly what she’d been searching for: style, flow and grace. What began as artistic rediscovery became something more when Ojas and Alex Yoder, whose pro model board had become her quiver of choice for the past four seasons, recognised a deeper connection. Yoder and Tamai both share an obsession with listening spaces and pristine sound. Across winters in the Tetons, Alaska and Hokkaido, the three found common ground between the silence of powder runs and the precision of audio engineering.

This season, that convergence takes tangible form. Gentemstick’s 26-27 XY arrives adorned with Ojas’s graphics, its visual language reflecting a moment when three separate pursuits, Japanese snow surfing, board craft and sonic culture, finally aligned. An Ojas Tokyo listening space now sits within the Gentemstick showroom, a physical manifestation of that collision. The board itself remains Yoder’s one quiver answer to everything from east coast groomers to chest deep Hokkaido powder.

A release gathering takes place on November 5th from 6 to 9 pm at Pilgrim Surf Supply, where the marriage of image and sound, of mountain and studio, will be celebrated in full.

Imagery courtesy of Gentemstick (@devonojas).