KEEP THE
SIGNAL ON.

Sleeve notes written by Dead Channel during the album sessions

Rika: We made an album.
That still sounds ridiculous.
Not “we recorded some songs” or “we made a demo.”
An actual album.
There are copies of it. With a cover. And our names on it.
I keep looking at one and thinking somebody is going to tell us there’s been a mistake.

The funny thing is you can sort of hear us learning how to be a band across it.
Some of the songs are really old. Me and Yumi wrote the first versions when we barely knew what we were doing.

Yumi: She means she barely knew what she was doing.

Rika: Mostly.
Those early songs are basically us trying to make punk music as fast as possible because speed covers a lot of mistakes.

Yumi: There were occasions where Rika changed key accidentally and simply kept going.

Rika: Confidence.
The first songs are still us though, so we kept them rough.
Then Ren turns up and suddenly we sound like we might actually know what a song is supposed to do.

Ren: I knew where one was.

Rika: See? Professional.
We met Ren at a jam session in the club and he made everything immediately tighter without making it boring. Me and Yumi had been charging through songs and hoping everybody arrived at the chorus together.
Ren actually counts and he actually knows what he’s doing and taught us a lot about making music.

Ren: That’s so nice.

Yumi: It was honestly quite upsetting.

He also made us start listening to what the drums were doing instead of just playing louder whenever we got lost.
The songs change after that.
You can hear us stop being two people with songs and start becoming a band.
Then Mika happened.

Mika: I did not “happen.”

Rika: You absolutely happened.
Mika was working around the club, carrying equipment, fixing things, making other people’s gear work when it really shouldn’t.
Yumi and I went to see her at home because we’d heard she played keyboards and did weird electronic stuff.
We thought we were auditioning her.
We were not.

Yumi: We entered Mika’s room and immediately realised she owned more equipment than the entire club.

Mika: Some of it belonged to the club.

Yumi: Not the worrying bits.

She played us things we didn’t even understand at first.
Old synths.
Tape loops.
Cheap rhythm boxes.
Keys that made noises like something was waking up badly.

Mika: That one needed servicing.

Rika: We asked if she wanted to join.
She said yes like we were asking whether she wanted chips.
That changed things again.
Suddenly songs could breathe differently.
We didn’t have to solve every problem with another guitar part and Mika knew about producing and recording.
And then Kai arrived.

Kai: Best entrance so far.

Yumi: You walked up to Rika at the bar and tried to hit on her.

Kai: Exactly.

Rika: Kai had seen us play and decided the correct response was apparently to come over afterward and start talking like he already knew us.

Kai: I was charming.

Rika: You were very blond and a cocky little English shit.

Kai: Also true.

He could play though.
Really play.
Different to me.
Cleaner when he wanted to be, flashier all the time, and irritatingly confident.
We tried two guitars together and it worked straight away.
That was probably the point where the thing on this record became properly Dead Channel.

Rika: We didn’t sit down and decide what Dead Channel was supposed to sound like.
It just sort of happened every time somebody new joined.
That’s probably why this record jumps around a bit.
Some songs are straight punk.
Some are harder rock.
Some have synths all over them.
Some are basically just five people seeing if we can make the room shake.
We like that.

Yumi: We also like that nobody told us to make it consistent.

Mika: Consistency is often overrated.

Ren: Staying in time is not.

Rika: We’re still figuring things out.
That’s the exciting part.
We know more than we did when the first songs were written, but nowhere near enough to get bored yet.
We’ve got more songs already.
Kai keeps writing things he says are “definitely singles.”

Kai: They are.

Yumi: They are not.

Mika: Statistical confidence currently low.

Ren: I haven’t heard them.

Kai: Absolutely no support in this band.

We want to play everywhere.
Tiny clubs, bigger clubs, anywhere that will have us.
We want to make another record.
Then another one.
We want better equipment.

Mika: I do not require better equipment.

Rika: Mika wants older equipment.

Mika: Correct.

Rika: Mostly we just want to keep doing this.
Right now it feels like everything is starting.
Maybe in a few years we’ll listen to this album and hear all the things we did wrong.
Probably loads.
But right now?
We made a fucking album.
That feels enormous.

— Rika, Yumi, Ren, Mika & Kai

Still Here

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

This album nearly had a much stupider name.

For quite a while we were calling it We’re Back, Did You Miss Us?, which amused us enough that nobody bothered to change it.

Then, somewhere near the end, Still Here started feeling more accurate.

We weren’t really “back.” That makes it sound as though the years between records didn’t happen. They did. A lot happened.

Yumi got married and became a mum. Mika opened the shop. Mika: And found Pixel so cuuuute! Ren continued being mysteriously employed by every band in Tokyo. Ren: I play drums, what can I say!

Kai made his own records. I made mine. Kai and I stopped being a couple, eventually learned to be friends and discovered that this was considerably easier once neither of us was nineteen. Kai: We were spectacularly bad at nineteen.

You were twenty. Kai: See? Still getting the last word.

The reunion itself wasn’t planned. I was playing a small set and one person became two, then three, then four, then suddenly all five of us were onstage again. The weird thing wasn’t that it sounded good. I expected it to sound good.

The weird thing was how normal it felt.

Nobody needed the band anymore.

That saved the band.

When we were younger, Dead Channel was rent, identity, relationships, ambition, fear and every stupid argument about what our lives were supposed to become. This time Yumi could go home to her family. Mika could open the shop in the morning. Ren had other gigs. Kai had his own career. I had mine.

We could play because we wanted to.

You can hear that all over this record.

It’s broader than the first two because nobody was trying to make every song prove what Dead Channel was. Some of it is punk. Some of it is post-punk. There are bright synth songs, harder guitar songs and that long atmospheric piece where Mika was allowed to disappear into her machines for six minutes without somebody from a label asking where the chorus was. It’s not us bringing solo material to the band, but the band allowing our individual voices to come through. Yumi: I think that’s a good point.

We laughed a lot.

That sounds sentimental, but it matters. I don’t remember laughing much toward the end of Perfect Reception. Kai: Oh god no. We all went into ourselves. Mika: I was soooo sad at the end of that, I saw us all drifting apart.

The title track became the obvious centre of it. Not “we’ve returned.” Not “nothing changed.”

Just: we’re still here.

Older. Better at some things. Worse at staying out late. Less interested in impressing anybody.

We didn’t know whether there’d be another Dead Channel record after this one.

We didn’t need to know.

That was another thing age finally taught us.

— Rika

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

I would like the record to show that I objected to this release. Strongly. But that damned blue-haired goblin Mika had somehow gotten her hands on these to add to her collection of hard drives. (Yumi: I can’t possibly comment how she got these.) We found them all on the For the Fans, Love Mika hard drive under a folder named ‘future blackmail material!’. God I miss Mika. She’s cleaned them all up of course she had.

There is a reason most people do not publish recordings of themselves learning three chords at fifteen.

I sound terrible.

Not charmingly rough. Not “you can hear the talent already.” Terrible.

The timing wanders. I forget words while I’m singing them. I stop halfway through things. I swear at the guitar as though it has personally betrayed me.

Which, to be fair, became a long-term feature of our relationship.

Heartbreaker was already a much better guitar than I deserved.

I bought it because it looked lonely.

That’s the truth.

I didn’t know it was an old professional Kuroda. I didn’t know somebody had already played the hell out of it before me. I didn’t put the word HEARTBREAKER on the neck. That was already there.

I just liked it.

These tapes are basically me discovering that liking a guitar and being able to play one are very different things.

I had E, A and D eventually. Sometimes in the same song.

I recorded constantly because a cheap recorder didn’t judge me. If I forgot a melody, I could find it again. If something sounded awful, I could record another version that also sounded awful but in a slightly more useful way.

The interesting thing, listening now, is how slowly songs appear.

There is no magical first attempt where I suddenly become the person who later made records.

A line survives because I like one word. A chord change starts working by accident. Something I record as a joke becomes the bit I remember the next day.

That matters to me more than whether any of it is good.

I spent years being asked when I “knew” I was going to be a musician.

There wasn’t a moment.

There was just this.

Sitting in a room.

Trying again.

If you’re learning something and you’re bad at it, congratulations. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be. That’s why I put these up on the site, it’s a nice reminder that we all start somewhere and it’s fucking hard work and it’s OK to stumble. Just keep at it.

Also…fuck you Mika.

— Rika

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

I had started this album before Mika came back into my life.

Then I walked into her shop again.

Not long after that I asked her to produce it with me.

That changed the whole record.

I knew I didn’t want to make another autobiography. Heartbreaker had done that job and I had no interest in spending the rest of my career explaining myself in chronological order.

I wanted songs about where I was now, but also songs about other people, other situations, things I saw, things that annoyed me and things I found funny.

Mika understood that immediately.

She also understood that I had developed a bad habit of filling every empty part with guitar.

She solved this by muting me occasionally.

(Mika: Temporarily.)

She played piano and synths across the record and built little rhythmic things out of sounds I would never have thought to use. She was annoyingly good at knowing when a song needed one more element and when it needed three things removed.

She also wrote.

“Out of Office” is Mika’s song as if you couldn’t guess.

She wrote it, then recorded her own version. Mine is on this album because I loved it, but hers exists somewhere, maybe it’ll surface somewhere one day, I liked it, it was quintessentially Mika.

Knowing her, it is probably on a hard drive labelled “misc.” (Mika: 😀)

There is another song she is responsible for: “Two Years Old and Already Winning.”

That started because I told her about babysitting Hana when she was two.

I was explaining what a disaster it had been and Mika laughed for so long that I got offended.

Then she wrote lyrics about it.

Afterward she said we shouldn’t use it because it was too personal and named Hana. I agreed.

But we played it to Yumi.

Yumi laughed harder than Mika and insisted it had to go on the album. (Yumi: Hana LOVES it she sings is all the time!.)

So that settled that.

The other Mika crime involves “Teddy Bears Don’t Understand.”

I played her an old tape of me singing it at fifteen and said I was thinking of recording it again.

Apparently, while I was talking, the blue-haired goblin recorded the tape into her system.

She cleaned it up.

She put it on the final production master.

She sent the album to pressing.

Four thousand copies existed before I found out.

I rang her.

Before I managed to say a single word, she started giggling.

Not laughing normally. Giggling like a six-year-old who has successfully hidden a frog in your shoe.

This continued for about five minutes by which point I couldn’t help laughing. I guess it was in keeping with Heartbreaker. But honestly, I could’ve killed her if it wasn’t for that laugh. (Mika: What woudl you do without me, you’d be bored.)

Kai’s appearance was much less dramatic.

I sent him the demo for “Better Than the Plan” and asked if he wanted to play on it. He was in London, I was in Tokyo, and we never actually met during those sessions. He recorded his parts there, sent them back, and Mika stitched the whole thing together with whatever digital witchcraft she pretended was ordinary engineering.

The album got bigger than I originally planned.

That’s appropriate.

It’s called The Space Between.

Turns out there was more room there than I thought.

— Rika

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

I don’t know how to write this one neatly.

I was already writing new songs when several parts of my life changed at once.

Yumi’s marriage was ending.

Mika was ill.

Kai and I, after years of being much better friends than lovers, somehow found our way back to each other without repeating the stupid parts.

Then Mika died.

I recorded most of this album after that.

It is the hardest record I have ever made.

Not because the songs are technically difficult.

Because every time something sounded right, my first instinct was to send it to Mika.

Then I remembered.

There are songs here about getting older and becoming responsible. I genuinely do spend more of my time now writing for other artists and doing session work than touring. Dead Channel gigs had slowed down.

I loved them more because of that.

There is a song about Nami, nearly twenty now and playing in her own band. I watched her from the back of a club and had the very strange experience of realising the soaked thirteen-year-old kid I’d once walked home had become somebody I would happily buy a ticket to see.

There is a song for Yumi.

She didn’t need pity. She needed reminding that surviving was something she already knew how to do.

There is one for Ren, because somebody should occasionally thank the person who counts everybody in and then spends decades standing behind them.

There is a song with Kai where we finally say out loud that we made it back to each other.

Not the old relationship.

A new one.

We also say something else.

We’re having a baby.

That still looks strange written down.

Then Heartbreaker broke.

Properly.

People had been keeping that guitar alive for years, and by “people” I mostly mean Mika.

She could make impossible repairs seem routine. After she was gone, I took the guitar elsewhere and the answer was finally the one I had been avoiding.

No.

Nothing left that could be repaired without replacing the thing itself.

At first that felt cruel.

Then it felt strangely right.

Heartbreaker had been there from fifteen years old to the very end of the Dead Channel journey. It broke when one of the people who had kept both the guitar and the band functioning was gone.

I don’t think I believe in signs.

I do believe in timing.

“The Last Chord” is for the guitar.

The final song is the funeral.

I never say Mika’s name in it because I didn’t need to.

This whole album is for her.

She made strange things beautiful.

She made broken things work longer than they should have.

She made all of us sound better.

I wish she had been here to tell me which parts of this record I overproduced.

She would have had a list.

Heartbreaker’s still with me, I framed it and hung it on my wall next to a photo of Mika. That seemed appropriate.

Always cherish that which you love and never, ever avoid saying the things that matter, you never know when you won’t have the chance.

— Rika

Sleeve note by Kai Hayashi

I recorded this one in London.

That matters.

After years in Tokyo, coming back to Britain felt less like going home and more like visiting a place that knew an old version of me very well.

Same streets.

Different bloke.

I had wanted to make a proper guitar record under my own name, not Dead Channel with missing members and not an apology for leaving anything behind.

So I found musicians I liked, got into a London studio and made the kind of record I wanted to make: post-punk, new wave, loud guitars, big hooks, a bit of swagger and enough space for the quieter bits to hurt when they needed to.

I’m proud of it.

Properly proud.

It did well in the UK too, which I wasn’t expecting to care about as much as I did.

Then I got to tour it around my home country.

That was fun.

No grand emotional pilgrimage. Just a genuinely good tour: familiar cities, places I’d never played before, friends turning up, people singing songs that hadn’t existed a year earlier.

There was something satisfying about coming back on my own terms.

The title is the whole record, really.

For years I kept trying to answer the question of where I belonged as though there had to be one correct response.

England?

Japan?

Tokyo?

London?

Eventually I got bored of asking.

Both countries made me.

Neither one gets exclusive ownership.

“The Girl with the Red Streaks” is obviously Rika.

Before anybody gets clever: no, it wasn’t me trying to win her back.

By then we had become friends again, which was much rarer and more useful.

I wanted to remember the girl I first knew, not the public Riot version or the person from the arguments at the end.

I think I got close.

I also covered the bits of Britain that had become strange to me and the bits that still felt automatic. That’s where some of the displacement in the record comes from.

Funny thing happened later during Rika’s The Space Between sessions.

She sent me a demo of “Better Than the Plan” and asked if I fancied playing on it.

I was still in London.

She was in Tokyo.

We didn’t meet once during the recording.

I tracked the guitars and vocals here, sent the files over, and Mika did her usual digital magic until it sounded like we’d been standing in adjacent booths.

That’s production for you.

Or witchcraft.

With Mika the distinction was often theoretical.

No Fixed Address wasn’t me deciding I had nowhere to belong.

It was the opposite.

I had finally stopped needing one address to explain the rest of me.

Still one of my favourite records I’ve made.

Still like playing the songs.

Still hate packing.

— Kai

Sleeve note by Kai Hayashi

Most of these songs were written during my first couple of years in Tokyo.

Some of them were written before I really had any business pretending I knew what I was doing.

I came to Japan young, skint and in trouble.

That’s the tidy version.

The untidy version involves too much drink, drugs, fights, police and the slow realisation that if I carried on treating self-destruction like a personality I was going to run out of road.

Tokyo didn’t fix me.

My dad didn’t fix me either.

He gave me somewhere to land.

That was enough.

The early songs are about that first stretch: leaving England because I knew I needed to leave, trying to improve my Japanese enough to stop sounding like a textbook, getting temporary jobs, discovering what parts of Japanese culture felt familiar for reasons I couldn’t explain and what parts made me feel completely foreign.

Being half-Japanese and half-British had always been something other people found easier to define than I did.

“Living on the Border” came from finally realising I didn’t have to choose one side and perform it correctly.

I also wrote about my dad.

He had met my mum in Britain through work, gone back to Japan later, and I grew up with a relationship that had too much distance in it. I wasn’t angry at him by the time I got here.

I mostly wanted to know him.

That turned out to be slower and less dramatic than songs usually make these things.

Good.

The record changes as I change.

The first songs have more danger in them. Later, I’m working rubbish jobs and trying to work out what I actually want.

Then I see Dead Channel.

Four-piece version.

Not me.

Rika at the front.

Yumi on bass, Ren on drums, Mika doing things to electronics I didn’t understand.

I remember standing there thinking: that’s it.

Not “I want to join that band.”

More like: that’s what I want my life to feel like.

The song ends with me seeing Rika at the bar.

That leads into “Sideways Glances.”

“Strike Like Lightning” is later again — just after we got together — and yes, it is exactly as embarrassing as a young man writing a song about how cool his new girlfriend is sounds.

I stand by it completely.

The piano song came after I noticed Rika starting to mess around with drink and drugs in a way I recognised.

I knew where that road went.

I wanted her to know she could still be wild without disappearing inside it.

I don’t know whether I said it well at the time.

I meant it.

This little record is me before Dead Channel, then right at the door.

One-way ticket.

No plan back.

Best reckless decision I ever made.

— Kai

Sleeve note by Mika Saionji

I was told sleeve notes should explain the album. This assumes I know what the album is about. I have made a list. The list has not helped. So.

I did not intend to make an album. That is probably important. I had a bunch of stuff from the Dead Channel recordings and I wasn’t a huge contributor though, I LOVE Dead Channel but my songs aren’t really right for that. Working at my shop I get some dead time while I’m fixing stuff or cleaning up. So I scribble lyrics down and little tunes. Most of Soft Errors was recorded after I closed the shop. It is quieter then.

Not quiet.

Quieter.

Then there were several songs.

I put them all in a folder called:

NOT_AN_ALBUM

There are fourteen tracks now.

This was perhaps poor file management.

Its quirky and perhaps not what a Dead Channel fan would like, but it’s mine and you don’t have to listen to it. I think I managed to edit all the sounds of Pixel knocking things onto the floor.

Pixel is my cat.

He is black and white.

He works here.

His responsibilities include sleeping on invoices, sitting on equipment I am currently using and appearing beside customers who claim not to like cats.

He is very good at all three.

I thought I was writing songs about machines.

Faults. Signals. Waiting. Things being unplugged when they should not be unplugged.

Apparently several of them are about people.

This was disappointing because machines are easier.

Machines usually tell you what is wrong.

People say "I'm fine" and then write an entire album.

"Five Empty Channels" is probably the obvious one.

I missed Rika, Yumi, Ren and Kai.

I did not want to reform Dead Channel.

Those are different statements.

You can miss a thing without trying to rebuild it exactly as it was.

Sometimes the original circuit is gone.

Sometimes the replacement changes the sound.

Sometimes that is okay.

Electronics people understand this.

Probably therapists too.

Rika eventually came back into the shop.

That sentence makes it sound dramatic.

She walked through the door.

Pixel ignored her for six minutes and then sat on her coat.

I wrote "Still Got Your Number" after that.

Rika sings on it.

She also plays guitar because apparently arriving at somebody's workplace means you can immediately become session personnel.

Her voice is much rougher than mine, which I like. It makes the song sound as though two completely different radios have accidentally found the same station.

The first twelve songs don't know she is coming back.

The bonus track does.

This makes the album chronologically untidy.

I considered fixing it.

I did not.

Then there is Nami.

This requires explanation.

Nami was thirteen when Rika found her standing outside a club in the rain because she had sneaked out to see Rika play and was too young to get inside.

This is not recommended behaviour.

Rika walked her home.

Later she brought Nami and her guitar to the shop.

The guitar was second-hand, black, needed strings, had action high enough to qualify as architecture and was being played by someone who was very determined not to admit her fingers hurt.

I fixed it.

Nami kept coming back.

Her mum knows now.

This is important.

At some point Nami began "helping" in the shop.

She sorts tapes.

Sometimes correctly.

She labels cables.

This is useful.

She makes Pixel chase guitar picks.

This is less useful.

She asks approximately forty-seven questions per hour.

This is actually quite useful because some of them are good questions.

"The Girl in the Rain" is about her.

She sings on it.

She also plays guitar.

Basic guitar.

Enthusiastic guitar.

Occasionally guitar in the correct tempo.

I kept those bits.

I like recordings where people sound like themselves.

That may be the main idea of Soft Errors, actually.

Wait.

That is probably what I should have written at the beginning.

Faults are not always defects.

Old machines drift.

Tape stretches.

Keys stick.

People miss notes.

People disappear and come back.

Thirteen-year-old girls stand in the rain because they desperately want to hear a band.

Cats sleep on warm synthesizers even when specifically asked not to.

Things acquire character because they are imperfect, not despite it.

You should repair what is broken.

You do not have to remove everything unusual.

This applies to people less reliably than electronics.

Do not attempt to repair people with a soldering iron.

That remains the principal technical note.

Thank you for listening.

If the left channel makes a strange clicking noise on track six, check your speakers first.

If it is still there, it is probably intentional.

Probably.

Pixel did not say hello.

Pixel is asleep.

— Mika

Joint sleeve note

Rika: We’re making this because playing together is fun again.

That sounds too simple, but it really is the reason.

Kai and I have spent years learning how not to be a couple. Eventually we got good at it. We have separate careers, separate lives and enough distance from our twenties that being in the same room no longer automatically produces an argument.

Then we play guitar together.

Still works.

Annoyingly well.

Kai: Extremely well.

Rika: The whole point of We’re Better Apart is that we aren’t trying to restart Dead Channel and we aren’t trying to get back together.

Right now, “better apart” is true.

We like one another more now that we’ve stopped trying to make the relationship do something it couldn’t do.

Musically, though, we still have this ridiculous connection.

My guitar tends to be rougher and heavier. Kai’s is brighter and more precise when he wants it to be, showier when he doesn’t.

Kai: “Showier” sounds judgmental.

Rika: It is descriptive.

The songs turn into twin-guitar songs very quickly. Not guitar battles. Conversations.

Sometimes arguments.

Healthy ones.

Mostly.

Kai: The sessions are almost suspiciously easy.

People still assume that if Rika and I are in a room together there must be unresolved romance hiding under a chair somewhere.

There isn’t.

There are amplifiers.

Much more useful.

We write fast songs, slower songs, night-driving songs, songs about terrible decisions and songs where the entire justification is that the riff makes both of us grin.

Only a couple are really about us.

“We’re Good Together, Better Apart” says exactly where we are now.

“All the Way Here” is the longer look back.

The rest is two musicians enjoying themselves.

Rika: We also deliberately keep the studio recordings clean of all the fake “look how spontaneous we are” rubbish.

No staged laughter.

No pretend rehearsal chatter.

We do laugh.

We just don’t need to put it between songs to prove we’re friends.

And that’s really what this record is about.

Not fixing the past. Not deciding we secretly made some terrible mistake by breaking up. Not using music as an excuse to reopen something that took us years to close properly.

We’re friends.

Good ones, finally.

Being apart is what gave us enough room to become that.

Now we can walk into a studio together, argue about guitar tones instead of our entire relationship, play too loudly and go home still liking each other.

That feels like progress.

Kai: Also, my solos are better.

Rika: End the sleeve note.

— Rika & Kai

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

I did not want to clear the shop.

That is the first honest thing I can say about this record.

After Mika died, the practical things still had to happen. Keys. Paperwork. Equipment. Boxes. A lifetime of cables that were apparently all important for completely different reasons.

Yumi came with me.

Nami came too.

The three of us spent days sorting through Mika’s Retro Tech & Repairs, and every drawer contained another reason to stop working.

Nami found old photos. Yumi found receipts going back years. I found a bag labelled “probably useful” containing objects I still cannot identify.

Then we found the hard drive.

There was a heart drawn on it in pink marker and, underneath:

FOR THE FANS

LOVE MIKA

That was very Mika.

No dramatic letter. No instructions. Just a hard drive she’d apparently been filling for years.

It was ridiculous.

There was so much on it.

Dead Channel outtakes from the Static Shockz sessions. Alternate versions from Perfect Reception. Songs we’d forgotten recording. Half-finished experiments. Proper finished songs that lost arguments about track order. Rough room recordings. Different mixes.

There was material from Still Here.

There was even stuff from The Space Between, which Mika produced with me. Songs we’d taken off the final album were sitting there neatly labelled because apparently the blue-haired goblin did not believe in deleting anything.

(Yumi: Sensible policy.)

You would say that. You still own clothes from when we lived together.

(Yumi: They fit.)

The difficult part was deciding what this album was.

It could not be “Mika’s final Dead Channel album.” She never made that.

It could not be us pretending all these songs belonged together. They don’t. That’s the point.

This is an archive.

It’s a tour through different versions of us, including versions some of us had happily forgotten.

Mika kept them anyway.

Nami helped catalogue the files because she was better at understanding Mika’s folder system than either of us.

I hated her for about twenty minutes when she found a recording of me alone in a rehearsal room after the original breakup.

Then I remembered who I was actually angry with and had to revise the situation.

Nami said that the title was obviously already written on the drive. When she said that, we never considered changing it, she was right.

There is one important thing not on this album.

Mika’s goodbye song, If You Find This, is separate.

That was intentional. Nami found it buried on the website in a hidden link as a character masked into the background. She’d put it up there not long before she died.

Nami had come around to see me, she had been crying for ages. The track hurts when you know what Mika went through.

So we put it on this weird collection of history because she wanted to say goodbye to you too.

Thank you for listening to the things she saved.

She saved a lot of us, too.

— Rika

(Nami: Don’t worry about Pixel, he’s with me now, I’ll look after him.)

Notes by Rika Kurosawa (Mika: And us!!!!)

We didn’t mean to make an EP.

The Black Lantern started putting on these quieter evenings where the stage was stripped back and people sat around tables rather than trying to push through each other at the front. We played one acoustic set because it sounded fun.

Then we played another.

Then somebody pointed out Mika had been recording them. Mika: I record everything.

We ended up with a few sessions from the Black Lantern, recorded across different evenings rather than as one formal concert. That’s why the sound changes slightly from track to track. Some nights the room is fuller. Some nights Ren is barely touching the kit. Some nights Kai decides “acoustic” means “play exactly as loudly, but on wood.” Kai: An acoustic guitar is still a guitar.

The thing we liked was how the songs changed when we stopped trying to reproduce the records.

There are parts on the studio versions where five instruments are fighting for the same moment. In the Black Lantern arrangements, somebody has to step back. Yumi became even more important because a good bass line can carry a whole song when there aren’t three distorted layers above it. Ren started playing with brushes, hands and whatever small percussion happened to be available. Ren: One track has a bottle.

Mika moved between small keyboards and piano whenever the club had one that could be persuaded to stay in tune. Kai and I traded acoustic parts instead of lead and rhythm guitar in the usual sense.

And we sang differently.

You can’t hide inside volume when somebody is sitting six metres away drinking something and looking directly at you.

A few of the songs surprised us. Things we’d always treated as fast rock songs turned out to have melodies underneath them. One or two songs became sadder than we realised. Others became funnier because you could finally hear the words properly.

The Black Lantern crowds were also good at leaving space.

No arena singalong nonsense. No attempt to make it grand. Just a club full of people listening, though they joined in when they knew it was right too. We had fun with them.

We kept the little bits of room sound because removing them made the recordings feel dishonest.

This EP isn’t supposed to be the definitive acoustic Dead Channel record.

It is a document of a few evenings we enjoyed.

— Rika

Yumi: The Black Lantern also has better chairs than most clubs.

Kai: This is apparently important enough for the sleeve.

Yumi: It is if you’re nearly thirty and carry a child around a lot.

Sleeve note by Rika Kurosawa

After the Black Lantern sessions we kept talking about songs we’d like to rearrange properly, without having to work around club noise, limited setup time or whatever piano happened to be in the corner.

So Unplugged is studio recorded.

No audience. We took the acoustic arrangements into a room and treated them as their own versions rather than quieter copies of the originals.

That distinction mattered.

Kai and I didn’t simply play the electric parts on acoustic guitars. Yumi rewrote bass lines. Ren changed whole grooves. We got some string players in to add some more depth, that was fun.

Mika ended up being the person who transformed the record. She was brilliant on the piano. (Mika: Awwwww stop it!)

I don’t mean “Mika can play keyboards, therefore she can play piano.” I mean properly, beautifully good. She has this way of leaving a note hanging where the rest of us would have filled the space. (Mika: I like to think of a piano a keyboard with hammers.)

Seriously, we had no idea you could play like that. (Mika: 😀)

The piano on the record became as important as the acoustic guitars. It made some old songs feel older in a good way, like we’d finally grown into them.

Mika kept that piano.

She had bought the piano from a thrift shop because it was “too good to leave there.” The sensible plan was apparently to use it for recording and then sell it on. (Yumi: That was never going to happen.)

She obviously kept it.

(Mika: It sounded nice.)

Her apartment was not designed for a piano. It ended up against the wall near the main walkway, and she had to turn sideways to squeeze past it every day. (Mika: This became less inconvenient after I realised I could put things on it, bonus shelf!.)

Unplugged isn’t about becoming tasteful. We didn’t grow up and decide distortion was embarrassing. Heartbreaker was actually in the studio most days, leaning against an amp, and I played it on one or two things where acoustic guitar wasn’t enough.

We found that you can reuse or repurpose something that you thought was done with, it was quite exciting, we brought some of the solo album tracks onto it too which was great fun as not everybody was as familiar with those so we got new energy on those tracks. (Yumi: OK I know I skipped out on some of those, I had a kid and was busy ya know!)

A loud song can become quiet without becoming weak. A young lyric can mean something different when sung by the person who wrote it years later. A drummer can play less and somehow feel bigger. A ridiculous second-hand piano can become the centre of a record.

We had stopped worrying about whether an arrangement was “Dead Channel enough.”

Five of us made it.

That was enough.

— Rika

(Ren: Piano was too loud.)

(Mika: It was not.)