David Fair, co-founder of Half Japanese, has died

David Fair (pictured, on the right), co-founder of Half Japanese and a central figure of the American underground, has died. The news was shared by the musician's friends and collaborators: no cause of death has been made public, though Fair had reportedly been undergoing treatment for cancer for some time.

Together with his brother Jad, David Fair had formed Half Japanese in the mid-1970s, initially recording at home an instinctive, raw and deliberately unconventional kind of music. Between art punk, noise and a DIY spirit, the band became over the years a touchstone for generations of independent musicians, thanks to a language as naïve as it was radical.
Half Japanese's music, even before punk came along, had already absorbed and processed that iconoclastic lesson, pushing it further in such a revolutionary way as to come close to an epileptic version of abstract "lo-fi", but with an intellectual edge. Music that revels in chaos, that has to reckon, one way or another, with the Shaggs, with master Van Vliet, with the Stooges (the "Raw Power" era ones), with the "exploded" palettes of Jackson Pollock, with the Velvet Underground (a freeze-dried "Sister Ray"), and, why not, with free-jazz's explorations at the very edge of psychic automatism.
Albums like the milestone “Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts” and “Music To Strip By” cemented their unconventional aesthetic. Fair remained in the band until the end of the 1980s, before leaving for family reasons.

Their influence even reached Kurt Cobain, who in 1993 chose Half Japanese as the opening act for some dates of the “In Utero“ tour. The Nirvana frontman spoke about them with enthusiasm to “Melody Maker”: “I like listening to Half Japanese on headphones while walking through shopping malls, right in the heart of American culture. And I think people would melt if they could just hear their music. People would start jumping off walls and hyperventilating”. At the time of his death, Cobain was also wearing a T-shirt from the band.

Half Japanese were later invited by Neutral Milk Hotel to the 2012 edition of All Tomorrow's Parties curated by Jeff Mangum. In 1993, Jeff Feuerzeig had dedicated the documentary “Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King” to their story. Remembering David Fair, the director wrote that he and Jad had changed his life “in so many positive and inspiring ways”, through “that joyous and revolutionary punk rock and their DIY ethic”. For the occasion, Feuerzeig has made the film freely available on Vimeo: the password is “callingallgirls”, the title of the band's debut EP, released in 1977.

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