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, who 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. With drummer Ren Nakamura and keyboardist Mika “Glitch” Saionji, 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.

Kai joins the band

Kai “Volt” Hayashi grew up in Britain, the son of a British mother and Japanese father.

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.

The move did not instantly solve anything. Kai had to improve his Japanese, reconnect with a father he barely knew, understand a part of his heritage that had previously felt distant and support himself through temporary work.

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. 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 became a couple.

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 increasingly strange as it progresses. Radio interference, distorted signals and corrupted recordings begin to appear between and inside the songs, ending with a brief unexplained hidden recording.

Whether there was ever anything genuinely mysterious happening in those sessions has remained open to interpretation.

What mattered at the time was that Static Shockz gave Dead Channel an identity that was immediately recognisable: a very human rock band colliding with unreliable technology.

Success and fracture: Perfect Reception

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

A major-label budget meant better studios, larger arrangements and considerably more commercial attention. The resulting record was polished, melodic and ambitious. It also exposed differences inside the band that had previously been easier to ignore.

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. Glitch disliked seeing unpredictable electronic sounds cleaned into something safer, while Ren simply missed playing entire songs in a room with the others.

The record itself was not a failure, and none of them have treated it as one. The problem was what making it revealed.

Further touring and promotion magnified those tensions until the band eventually separated.

Rika and Kai's relationship ended during the same period.

Separate lives and solo careers

The years after Dead Channel were not a single shared story.

Yumi married and became a mother. Ren continued playing, usually without making much fuss about it. Glitch opened Mika's Retro Tech & Repairs, combining her love of obsolete electronics with repair work and her own music.

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.

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.

Rika and Kai also eventually rebuilt a friendship.

That friendship mattered more than either of them understood at the time.

The reunion

The reunion began quietly.

Rika reconnected with Yumi and later visited Glitch at her repair shop. Old friendships were repaired gradually rather than through a single dramatic reconciliation.

Then a small Rika acoustic show changed things.

Ren joined her first. Yumi followed. Then Glitch. Finally Kai walked onto the stage.

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, Still Here.

It had originally carried the much more flippant working title Still Here, 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.

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.

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, discovered that her mother did not know where she was and walked her home.

That awkward beginning became a long friendship.

Rika helped Nami with guitar and confidence. Glitch repaired Nami's second-hand instrument and became another mentor. With the support of Nami's mother, Emi, she gradually became part of the wider circle around the band.

Nami occasionally appeared on informal recordings and rarities, although she was never a member of Dead Channel.

By the time she reached twenty, the nervous beginner had her own band and her own audience.

Rika, usually watching from somewhere near the back of the room, was enormously proud of her.

Rika and Kai: We’re Better Together

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

Their friendship after the breakup worked precisely because neither was 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 Better Together.

The title was not an attempt to rewrite the past. Their original relationship had failed for good reasons.

What changed was them.

Years of friendship, separate careers and ordinary adult life taught them how to talk before arguing, how to give each other space and how to stop treating every disagreement like something that had to be won.

Eventually they became a couple again.

Not because fate had been waiting patiently for them.

Because this time they knew how to make it work.

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. Glitch 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.

The Last Chord

By her mid-thirties, Rika had begun writing what would become The Last Chord, her final solo album.

It was a record about age, friendship and the fact that keeping something forever is not the same as loving it properly.

There were hopeful songs alongside the grief.

Rika wrote about still wanting one more song even as touring slowed down. She celebrated Nami becoming the musician she had once hoped to be. She promised support to an old friend whose marriage had ended. She wrote affectionately about the drummer who had spent years holding everybody else together without demanding attention.

She also recorded an acoustic duet with Kai confirming that the two had finally built a life together.

Near the end of the song came another piece of news.

Rika was pregnant.

But another story was running quietly underneath the album.

A close friend was seriously ill.

The friend was never named.

Listeners who knew the band did not need the name.

Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker survived far longer than anybody had a reasonable right to expect.

The guitar Rika had bought at fifteen had been refretted, rewired, repaired and patched repeatedly over the years. Much of its continued life owed something to having a gifted electronics obsessive among Rika's closest friends.

Eventually, however, the guitar could not be repaired again.

Rika wrote The Last Chord as its eulogy.

She remembered the pawnshop, the first terrible chords and all the different versions of herself that had held the same instrument.

There was also an absence in the song that some listeners noticed immediately.

Rika says that “they” told her Heartbreaker could not be saved.

She never says she took it to Glitch.

That detail was never explained.

A message from Rika

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