Azeka - Design by Tatuya Ishii

A very simple, but quite unusual watch again today.

Based on the information on the back, the watch is by Azeka. From what I can find, Azeka is a French trading company specialising in watches, and based the the French watch capital Besançon. Not much is available on the brand itself but as the Azeka website (Azeka.com) now shows information on the Réparalux brand, I guess they were either a subbrand or were taken over by Réparalux. Réparalux was founded in 1956 by Marcel Humbert-Droz and is a family business, also based in Besançon.
The watch design is by Tatuya Ishii who is a Japanese musician and artist/industrial designer in his 50s who also does character design and stage shows. He is also known as Tatsuya Ishii, and was the singer in the band Kome Kome Club, before becoming a solo artist and has now released 12 solo albums.

His design is very simple, with a small wing for the hour hand and a wavy line and spiral for the minutes. The face is also textured with dots and wavy lines, and one of the posts holding the spring bar for the strap is also modified.

The watch part is a general 2-hand dial with crown at the 4 o'clock position. The movement is such that the minute hand moves in steps every minute rather than the more usual smooth motion.

I don't know when the watch was produced, but I'd guess sometime in the 2000s.

Citizen Independent 1481010 D380 - Ken Ishii special edition

Today's watch is a special edition of a model I've posted about before.

This is the Ken Ishii special of the "Radioactive " D380 model. All of the D380s in the 1481010 range have the alarms composed by Ken Ishii, but this model has the symbol of the Ken Ishii album Innerelements (1994) on the button, and has a blue metal band. The watch was made in 1998, and released in limited numbers.

The D380 module has the normal functions of time, date, two alarms, and a chronograph, on the dot-matrix LCD display.

The full model number is D380-S68792

For more information on the 1481010 range see this page: 1481010 Overview

Citizen Independent 1481010 D380-L18404 blue & clear

Today, it's another of my Citizen Independent 1481010 collection. This watch was released sometime between 1998 and 2003, and can be found in a lot of different colours and many special editions. I'll be showing more of these as I work through my collection.

The watch itself has a curved dot matrix LCD, and the D380 module gives it a chronograph and two alarms.
The main standout part of the design is the large button with a nuclear reactor symbol on. When pressed, this sounds one of the two alarms, and the display shows jumping graphic equaliser style bars for a while.

The alarms were composed by Japanese DJ Ken Ishii (and there is an Ishii special edition in the 1481010 range).

The main strap is a one-piece metal band which is quite springy. A lot of these watches suffer from breakages of the strap in the plastic sections used for linking the parts of the watch together, probably due in part to the metal strap wanting to straighten all of the time.

For more info on the 1481010 brand, see http://whichwatchtoday.blogspot.com/p/citizen-independent-1481010-overview.html