David Fair, who co-founded the band Half Japanese with his brother Jad, has died

David Fair, the American musician who co-founded Half Japanese with his brother Jad Fair, has died. He had been receiving treatment for cancer for around two years, and died over the weekend of August 29 and 30.

The producer Don Fleming, a friend and collaborator, confirmed it on social media. He wrote that Fair's daughter Harper toasted him with a root beer float and that he died soon after, peacefully, describing him as the sweetest man, funny, and a pure artist and musician working entirely from the heart.

Half Japanese started in the brothers' bedroom in the mid-1970s, which is not a colourful detail but the actual method. Neither of them could play conventionally when they began, and they built songs out of what they could do rather than learning first, which turned into the band's whole argument: enthusiasm and imagination over technique.

The project found its audience in the post-punk underground of the 1980s and helped define the noisier, scrappier end of what became indie rock. Their lo-fi recordings were influential well beyond their sales, and generations of bands who never sounded like them took the permission from them.

The 1980 debut, Half Gentleman / Not Beasts, opened a discography that has kept expanding for more than four decades. Much of the band's 21st century output has come through the UK label Fire Records, which has also kept the older catalog in print.

Fleming's description of him is the one being repeated: a pure artist and musician working from the heart, with a sense of humour that the records carry as clearly as the noise does. The distance between that warmth and the band's reputation for abrasiveness is part of why Half Japanese kept a devoted audience.

Tributes have come from across the American underground since the news broke, and Jad Fair has continued to record and exhibit his own work. The band's place in the rock and indie underground is not in question, and the catalog remains in print.