The following message replaced the usual band-history update on this page.
I kept trying to find a clever way to write this.
Mika would have hated that.
So I’ll just tell you.
Mika Saionji died.
She had been ill for a while. Some of you probably worked that out from the songs. She knew what was happening, and somehow she still spent most of that time making the rest of us laugh, fixing things nobody else thought were worth fixing and telling us not to look so bloody miserable.
We said goodbye with Yumi, Ren, Kai and Nami beside her.
There are five people in Dead Channel.
There have always been five.
We’re not going to replace Mika.
That means Dead Channel is over.
There won’t be an audition, another version of the band or some tasteful way of carrying on with somebody standing behind her keyboards.
It wouldn’t be Dead Channel.
I know some people will say the music should continue, and it will. Yumi will make music. Ren will play. Kai will keep writing. Nami has her own band now and she’s brilliant. I’ll probably never manage to stop writing songs either.
But this channel has closed.
Thank you for staying with us through all of it: the tiny clubs, the stupid interviews, Static Shockz, Perfect Reception, the years when we weren’t speaking, Still Here, the reunion shows and every weird little recording Mika convinced us was completely normal.
Thank you for being kind when we got things wrong.
Thank you for coming back when we did.
And thank you for loving her.
She deserved that.
Mika once spent nearly an entire afternoon fixing a machine everyone else had already thrown away. I asked her why she bothered.
She looked at me like I’d asked the stupidest question she’d ever heard and said:
“Because it isn’t finished yet.”
I think about that a lot now.
We were lucky enough to have her for as long as we did.
I just wish it had been longer.
Goodbye, Glitch.
Thank you for every strange noise, every blue light, every impossible repair and every time you quietly made the rest of us sound better than we were.
May your machines be kind.
— Rika
