Bad Head is a monthly event held on every third Thursday at Pintology, a craft beer and whisky bar in Sasazuka in West Tokyo. The following essay was published in the hybrid zine/cassette tape compilation that we released in celebration of the first year of the event series:

Never Afraid

“I’ve got no time, but I’ve got time for you.”
– Cable Ties

Bad Head started out of a really personal place for me — making something new with new people right as Tokyo was emerging from the global pandemic. Those few years of teaching and working from home had left me feeling like I was just running in place — I’d created some of the most meaningful work in my lifetime: notably a handful of books, but I was tired of not seeing people. I wanted someplace to go filled with people that I liked after feeling like I’d been marooned on an island due to the pandemic.

Before Bad Head, there was a long-running punk DJ night called Mystery Meat that I would occasionally play at Beat Cafe in Dogenzaka that ended a few months before Kyle, Alvin and I cooked up the idea for BH. Mystery Meat was primarily the purview of a few friends of mine, and while it was super-fun, there were what I perceived as drawbacks: the event ran all night, it was too loud to talk to folks, the venue was really moldy so I always had a nasty cough the next day, there was a strict “’77 punk/garage only” vibe (which I always seemed to break when I played as I have an aversion to rule-following), and there was a high percentage chance of folks some of us didn’t want to hang out with who would perennially show up. Despite my whining, Mystery Meat was really, really great—it was the social nexus for a handful of circles of excellent people.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, the three founders of Mystery Meat moved away from Japan, so a community found itself rootless after the very last MM (for which I was very pleased to be asked to design the flyer). A lot of very positive things had been happening in my life around that time. At the height of the pandemic, my wife Yuki and I had opened Sailosaibin, a small shop in Sasazuka that sells a variety of apparel, books, and assorted odds and ends. In the early days of the shop, we were selling tape cassette players from China that had sampling functions and we moved quite a number of those, which friends really liked. Alvin and Kyle were two of the people that picked those up, and we talked about our love for weird/old technology. Meanwhile, each of us fiddled with a mix of old and new tech on our own, modifying tape, tape players, and other odds and ends. Alvin blew through a handful of those tape players modding them out, and Kyle was experimenting with what he could coax out of a multi-channel mixer.

Meanwhile, Kyle and his wife and business partner Yuki opened up Pintology, a really comfortable craft beer bar right down the street from Sailosaibin. Pintology has an incredibly warm and inviting vibe not dissimilar from the old American television show Cheers, and I took to hanging out there regularly. (Like nearly daily — Pintology is my home away from home.) The beer is great and the company is fantastic. All it took was one fascinating and intense conversation with Kyle about spirituality and religion for me to figure out that I’d met a dude who would become one of my best friends.

I’d met Alvin around the same time as Kyle and felt an instant kinship — Alvin was another designer and thinker who was incredibly dissatisfied with much of the culture of design. Just like with Kyle, I figured out that Alvin was someone I wanted to be super-close to after just a handful of talks. Alvin was in the midst of thinking through a number of new business/community ideas, as well. He’d just sold a business he’d been involved in for years and was interested in starting something new.
One day at the bar, the three of us got to talking. Kyle mentioned that he wanted to host salon-type events in their space. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but we came up with the idea of what might it be like if there were shows held at the bar that were relatively quiet compared to most shows in Tokyo.

What if they happened at a reasonable hour and people could still go to work and function the next day? What if the music was not confined to genre, but instead explored a mix of weirdo tape cassette-oriented music? There were a lot of “what if’s”, but we sorted out the name “Bad Head” real quick: tape heads go bad and loads of bartenders don’t know how to pour beer properly in Tokyo, resulting in pints of beer having bad heads of foam on top.

(Of course, the naughty connotation of the name sticks out most of all—but that’s a universal concern, and was funny enough.)

Opening Sailosaibin had filled me with a really jubilant sense of agency—it’s something I feel really strong about with my design/research/teaching practice— but something I’ve never really felt about making music. I enjoy playing music, but had always felt relegated to the sidelines in performing as my ideas were too weird for most of the folks I played music with in the past. Maybe starting something new with two new, really smart and really fun friends would help buoy myself in that way.
And the thing is, it did. We had the first Bad Head and a fair amount of folks showed up. Annoyingly, I got COVID and couldn’t attend, but folks came. I got to play the third edition and it reminded me why I hate playing music so much — it doesn’t matter how well things go or how small the venue, my stage fright is just off the charts. I stood there fucking with my karaoke Walkman/optical theremin/oscillator setup, avoiding eye contact with the folks in attendance, and sweat pouring out of every single one of my pores.

Playing music is one of the most singularly embarrassing things in the world for me. Whenever I play one of the shows, people listen attentively, and even occasionally dance a bit, which is really nice. It’s the same when Alvin and Kyle play, along with the dozens of other folks that have performed. Bad Head has become a magnet for a bunch of different circles of friends, who are intellectual and fun and unique in their own ways. And because of the low barrier of entry in regard to performing/ability to perform “music”, a lot of really great friends started asking to play/agreed to play when asked. It’s a space to fuck around and not be afraid to fail.

There are rules, however, and we insist that they be adhered to: no laptops or tablets or smartphones may be used to perform at Bad Head.

To do so just looks like office work, and we all have had enough of that.

Living in the world’s biggest city, there’s often a lot of pressure in peoples’ lives, and knowing that something really good is going to happen monthly is really cathartic. Our little event became a cultural and social tentpole for a bunch of people. It’s an event that happens once a month where you’re going to hear interesting music, drink something tasty, have nice conversations with people from around the world, and you know that you’re going to have a good time, even if you’ll have to change your t-shirt after your set.

(End essay)

Like I said, that essay was published in the hybrid zine/cassette tape compilation that we released in celebration of the first year of the event series.

Nearly nobody bought them and we are plagued with hundreds of copies which we have taken to giving away.

We’ve made an array of long sleeve shirts which sell at a snail’s pace.

We have also made a veritable arsenal of stickers which you’ll potentially run into globally.

Dozens of folks from all over the world show up at Pintology on the third Thursday of every month and perform. Contact microphones have been near-swallowed, modular synthesizers have been bleeped and blooped, records have been scratched ragged, the occasional guitar or four has been strummed, the rudiments of recording technology have been reinterpreted on the floor of the damn bar, and there has even been a bout of singing or “singing” on the very rare occasion.

Bad Head is Tokyo’s fringe culture kept alive outside of the cultural constraints of funded soft power. Formerly outsider sounds like Noise have become codified as a subculture and are relegated to specific venues and markets. It is the same with other genres and disciplines.

Bad Head doesn’t exist to satisfy one particular typology—it exists to exist.

But moreover, you are invited to join us.

The Bad Head community is kind enough to allow me to design all of the materials associated with the event series and assorted ephemera, allowing for a lot of image-making and typographic experimentation and silliness hand-in hand.

Making these things is the opposite of “business”.