The first rule of David Fair's guitar method was to throw away the rulebook. Fair, the co-founder of Half Japanese whose untutored noise helped turn a Maryland bedroom experiment into a foundational statement of do-it-yourself rock, died in August 2026. Stereogum said his label and longtime friend Jeff Feuerzeig announced his death on social media.

Fair and his brother, Jad, approached band-making as visual artists and music fans. In Uniontown, Maryland, they treated sound as another material to shape. One brother sang and played guitar while the other drummed, then they switched. Traditional tuning and familiar chords were optional because there was no other musician to accommodate. Fire Records dates Half Japanese's formation to 1974 and describes enthusiasm, experimentation, and the freedom to create as the brothers' working principles.

Their first record made that freedom tangible. Calling All Girls arrived in 1977 as a nine-song seven-inch packaged with a poster and inserts. Its first 500 copies were quickly taken by distributors, and another 500 followed. The scale was small, but the proposition was enormous: a home-made object could carry a private musical language into the world. The brothers stretched that language across the 1980 triple album 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts, a rush of guitar noise, small drums, tape experiments, jokes, love songs, and monsters.

Fair explained the method in his short manifesto How to Play Guitar: "If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day." Pitchfork later argued that this was a decision, not a deficiency, and heard in the debut a forecast of the home-recorded freedom practiced by Daniel Johnston and Beat Happening. Fair applied the same refusal of imitation to cover songs. He said the group often kept the words while making no attempt to reproduce the original melody.

As Half Japanese expanded, Fair's ideas remained at the center of its early records. Loud added saxophones, another guitarist, and a dedicated drummer to the brothers' attack. Our Solar System and Sing No Evil carried the group through 1985, when Fair completed his last album as a core member. Stepping away from regular band life gave him room for visual art and for other forms of recording. The long-delayed solo work Ballets built gentle, slowly shifting pieces from tape loops and such materials as marimba, rolling marbles, torn paper, and guitar.

The brothers kept finding reasons to work together. On 26 Monster Songs for Children in 1998, David selected a creature for every letter of the alphabet and enlisted his five-year-old son to introduce the songs. Halloween Songs followed in 2008. In 2014, David and Jad again reduced the process to one guitar and one set of drumsticks, alternating roles as they had at the beginning; those sessions became the 2016 album Shake, Cackle and Squall.

Fair's art also made a place for people to gather. He helped drummer Rick Dreyfuss organize Shakemore, an annual music festival that began in rural Westminster, Maryland, in 2007. After Dreyfuss died, Fair painted an enormous, playfully eerie likeness of his friend for the 2013 festival, and the portrait hung outside as bands played beneath the tent, according to The Washington Post.

The things that persist are as handmade and various as Fair's life in art: the first thousand copies of Calling All Girls, the six sides of 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts, a one-day guitar method, an alphabet of monsters, paper and paint, tape loops moving in and out of time, and a festival assembled from friends. Together they keep his central idea in motion, that making art begins the moment someone decides permission is unnecessary.