IT STARTED
WITH HEARTBREAKER.

Early years: Rika, Yumi and the first band

Dead Channel began with Rika Kurosawa and a guitar she barely knew how to play.

At fifteen, Rika bought a battered black-and-red Kuroda electric guitar from a pawnshop. Someone had already scratched HEARTBREAKER into the back of its neck. She learned by trial and error, documenting the process on rough bedroom recordings later collected as The Heartbreaker Tapes.

At sixteen she met bassist Yumi Arisawa in a music shop scanning over a shelf of pedals she had no idea what to do with. Yumi tried to help her and ended up going back to Rika’s house where Yumi quickly realised that Rika had accidentally bought a much better instrument than she understood. Yumi taught her some basic maintenance, started playing alongside her and became her closest musical friend.

The two eventually shared a cheap bedsit while working ordinary jobs and trying to make music whenever they could. After an awful jam session at a local club they met local drummer Ren ‘Crash’ Nakamura who joined the two girls, he was more experienced and helped the girls move forward with future jam sessions with more confidence and skill. They realised they needed something extra and somebody mentioned that the local club roadie Mika “Glitch” Saionji was a keyboardist and good at mixing and recording, after meeting and demonstrating her talent the younger girl joined the trio and shortly afterwards they formed the original four-piece Dead Channel and began playing Tokyo's small clubs.

The early sound was rough, loud and exploratory: Rika's abrasive guitar, Yumi's melodic bass, Ren's physical drumming and Glitch's increasingly strange collection of synthesizers, samplers and old electronics. They were rough around the edges, but appealed to the delinquent teenaged crowds, able to see themselves in the four scrappy teenagers on stage.

Kai joins the band

After a small gig being one of several support bands for a larger local band, Rika encountered Kai “Volt” Hayashi, a British-Japanese singer and guitarist. Kai was a year or so older than the rest of the band and had recently arrived in Tokyo to live with his father, he grew up in Britain.

His later One Way Ticket recordings document a difficult adolescence. By sixteen or seventeen he was living largely on his own, drinking heavily, using drugs, getting into fights and accumulating trouble with the police. Eventually he recognised that what he was calling fun was becoming something much darker.

He left Britain for Tokyo, where his father offered him somewhere to stay, Kai hoping to move away from the darker influences would help him sort himself out.

The move did not instantly solve anything, Kai felt like a stranger. Kai had to improve his limited Japanese, learn to reconnect with a father he barely knew, understand a part of his heritage that had previously felt distant and support himself through temporary work. But through that he continued to play his guitar and write songs, attending the same kind of clubs as Dead Channel jammed and played in. A few gigs with various bands helped him connect to the music culture and help him find a place.

Then he saw Dead Channel.

The band were still a four-piece. Kai was immediately drawn to both their sound and Rika, whom he met at the bar after the show, his cocky British swagger getting him nowhere, in fact Rika laughed at his bad Japanese and presumptions, but he did tell her he liked the band. He eventually joined as second guitarist and male co-lead vocalist.

His bright, theatrical style contrasted with Rika's rougher delivery, and their two guitars transformed the band's sound.

They also began a relationship that would define them for the next decade or two.

Breakthrough: Static Shockz

Dead Channel's debut, Static Shockz, captured a young band before anybody had managed to tidy them up.

It was fast, dirty and frequently chaotic: punk and post-punk guitars, Yumi's prominent bass, Ren's live-room drumming and Glitch's analog electronics all competing for space.

What begins as an exuberant underground rock record becomes a varied mix of punk, post-punk, synthpop and even a ballad for Rika’s guitar Heartbreaker. Mika produced the album in her loft apartment after the band rented local studio space when they could. The album is messy and is meant to be.

While it was only distributed locally, at least until they signed their record deal, it got attention from some record labels.

Success and fracture: Perfect Reception

The second album, Perfect Reception, brought Dead Channel into a very different environment.

Signed to a modest label who agreed to distribute Static Shockz meant better studios, larger arrangements and considerably more commercial attention as well as experienced production expertise. The resulting record was polished, melodic and ambitious. The writing and recording for the second album was done during a nationwide tour to support the re-release of the first album, marketed as a rags to riches band, interviews, photoshoots and television appearances meant a gruelling schedule for the still young band.

Rika resisted the increasing loss of control over songs and lyrics. Kai enjoyed some of the opportunities that came with bigger production. Yumi became increasingly concerned by the band's contracts noticing that the share of the royalties seemed small. Mika disliked the overproduced sound and engineers who refused to let her tinker in what had been her domain, while Ren simply missed playing entire songs in a room with the others.

The band made an album that while competent and with some great individual tracks just didn’t feel like theirs, it sounded like something they had been asked to make. They simply weren’t as happy as they had been, despite having everything young musicians aspired to.

Further touring and promotion magnified those tensions until the band simply stopped.

Rika and Kai's relationship ended during the same period as the tensions flared into arguments and Rika experimented with drink and drugs, Kai was able to pull her out of it, but their relationship was fractured and they separated when the band split. Everybody went down different roads and had little contact with each other for some time.

Post Break-Up

The period after Dead Channel were not a single shared story. Royalties continued from the two albums which gave the group some limited cushioning, but the bad taste left by the meddling record label and the marketing machines soured Dead Channel in the minds of the bandmates.

Rika developed a more personal solo career, gradually moving beyond the Riot persona without rejecting it. Her work became broader, quieter in places and increasingly interested in songwriting rather than simply performance. She released a post-mortem on the Dead Channel break-up on her album Heartbreaker.

Yumi married and became a mother, continuing only recreationally with her music. Ren continued playing throughout Japan and abroad joining various touring bands. Mika opened Mika's Retro Tech & Repairs, combining her love of obsolete electronics with repair work and her own music, continuing to record songs in her spare time.

Kai returned to England to reconnect with his friends and family there where he gigged.

Solo work and reunion

The reunion began quietly.

After finishing a solo set at the same club they performed in years before, Rika reconnected with Yumi who attended the acoustic gig. Yumi suggested Rika see Mika and later visited her repair shop. Old friendships were repaired gradually rather than through a single dramatic reconciliation.

It was during this period Rika was working on her second solo album which was partially written when Mika offered to produce it saying that the current recordings were ‘sub-optimal’.

Rika agreed and the result was her second solo album The Space Between which featured a large collection of songs, two were penned or co-penned by Mika.

At a similar time Kai's solo album No Fixed Address returned to questions that had followed him since he left Britain: whether home was a place, a person or simply somewhere he stopped moving for a while. It drew equally on his British and Japanese identities without treating either as the correct answer. The album performed modestly in his home country and quite well in Japan, supporting a nationwide tour of small venues in the UK.

Kai recorded vocal and guitar parts for The Space Between track ‘Better Than The Plan’ in London with Mika mixing Rika’s Tokyo recording on the track.

Then a small Rika acoustic show changed things, unbeknown to her Yumi had reached out to the original band members.

Ren joined her first. Yumi followed. Then Mika and finally Kai walked onto the stage from the back of the club room, recently arrived back from London.

For the first time in years, the five of them played together.

It might have remained a one-off nostalgia exercise, but something had changed. Nobody needed Dead Channel to provide an identity anymore. They had careers, families, businesses and other music.

That gave the band something they had rarely possessed when they were young: perspective.

They discovered they still enjoyed making noise together.

Still Here

Seven years after Perfect Reception, Dead Channel released their third studio album, this time like Static Shockz it was self-produced with Mika once again helming the producing and mixing, titled Still Here.

It had originally carried the much more flippant working title We’re Back, Did You Miss Us?, but Still Here ultimately described the record better.

This was not an attempt to recreate Static Shockz.

The band were older, better players and far less interested in proving that they were still dangerous. The album moved freely between punk, post-punk, guitar rock, synth-pop and longer atmospheric pieces. Some songs were loud and ridiculous. Others were reflective. Each member had time to shine helming their own songs and taking advantage of the ensemble to bring them to life.

Most importantly, it sounded like five people choosing to be in the same room again.

The title song became particularly associated with this second life of the band and later appeared in live recordings from several cities as a crowd pleasing finale.

Dead Channel were no longer trying to conquer anything.

They were simply still there.

Nami and the next generation

Rika first met Nami Kobayashi when Nami was thirteen.

Nami had sneaked out in heavy rain hoping to see one of Rika's solo shows, only to be refused entry because of her age. Rika found her outside afterwards, soaked to the bone clutching her guitar after hearing most of the gig through a door. Rika discovered that her mother did not know where she was and walked her home where they talked music.

That awkward beginning became a long friendship and mentorship.

Rika helped Nami with guitar and confidence. Mika repaired Nami's second-hand instrument and became another mentor and eventually worked part time with Mika after school and at weekends in the shop where she learned about producing and mixing and sampling. With the support of Nami's mother, Emi, she gradually became part of the wider circle around the band. Mika and Rika attended Nami’s first public performance offering encouragement and advice.

Nami occasionally appeared on informal recordings and rarities, mostly when recording in Mika’s shop but she attended some recording sessions as a friend of the band, although she was never a member of Dead Channel the band collectively thought a lot about the youngster.

Rika and Kai: We’re Good Together, Better Apart

For a long time, Rika and Kai were genuinely better apart.

After the reunion gig, Kai returned full time to Tokyo. Kai and Rika were not trying to rebuild the relationship they had at nineteen. They had grown into different people and learned to value one another without needing to possess one another.

Their later collaboration eventually became We’re Good Together, Better Apart which Mika again produced. It was a return to making fun music together and is less autobiographical than their previous solo works.

It was a fun time and it did rekindle something in them. With Dead Channel playing gigs a couple of times a month, the friendship strengthened and eventually over the course of the following years, became a couple again.

The later Dead Channel years

Dead Channel never returned to the pace of their early career.

By their thirties, the members had other lives. Shows became less frequent and therefore, in some ways, more important.

Rika increasingly worked as a songwriter for other artists and as a session guitarist. Yumi balanced music with family life. Mika continued running her shop. Ren kept playing whenever someone put a drum kit in front of him. Kai maintained his own solo work alongside the band.

Their Unplugged concert recording captured this period particularly well.

Instead of trying to recreate the aggression of their twenties, the five sat together in their local club and rearranged old material around acoustic guitars, piano, bass and restrained percussion.

Heartbreaker was still there too, increasingly battered and increasingly dependent on repair.

The band had finally learned that growing older did not require apologising for who they had been.

They returned to the studio once more to record Raw To The Bone, an acoustic rearrangement of some of their old material and also a few original tracks.

The Last Chord

By her mid-thirties, Rika had begun writing what would become The Last Chord, her final solo album. But it changed dramatically. It started out about an album about getting older in a similar style to The Space Between including a track praising her protégé Nami, now 20 as she stepped into the light on her own.

Three things turned the album on its head. Yumi had been involved in a bitter separation and divorce after her husband left her for another woman. Yumi had stayed home to raise her daughter Hana and finding herself on her own meant she had to start from scratch, eventually finding work at a music shop and teaching students after school. After years of struggling Yumi had poured her heart to Rika and Rika wrote a song about those hard years for her friend.

Then Mika told the band she was dying. She didn’t make a fuss, she didn’t even sound bothered, the band members found themselves being rallied and comforted by Mika not the other way around. Rika wrote ‘All you ever do is smile’ for her friend. Mika passed away a few months later and the band mourned her and knew this was the end of Dead Channel, without Mika, there was no Dead Channel. Rika wrote Things Unspoken as a result.

Then Heartbreaker finally broke. Chronicling the guitar’s journey in The Last Chord a telltale note on the track makes it clear Mika was gone when Rika tried to get it repaired again, at the end of the Dead Channel road and the loss of Mika who had kept the old guitar working, it was time for Heartbreaker to stop.

For the fans, love Mika

While clearing out Mika’s shop, Nami, Rika and Yumi found a hard drive marked ‘For the fans, love Mika’ it featured years of alternative takes, live recordings, unreleased tracks, tracks with Nami on them. Nami also uncovered Mika’s goodbye track ‘If you find this’. These tracks were poured over by the band and released, Mika had left a parting gift.