The Abridged version:
- Sacramento has an unlikely connection to the underground music scene in Japan.
- Local musician and promoter Zack Bissell has helped foster it, bringing bands to play at venues and homes across town.
- In just the last year, eight Japanese underground bands played at Sacramento’s DIY venues. Two more shows are booked for 2026. Bissell has also helped organize several tours in Japan.
Sacramento has a little-known point of pride. It has become a hub for Japanese underground bands touring the United States.
Artists will hit the expected destinations on a West Coast tour — San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland — but they keep ending up in Sacramento.
The music scene in the capital thrives on a DIY (do-it-yourself) spirit. With fewer resources than bigger cities, a network of artists and fans bands together to keep this heartbeat of culture thumping.
And local musician and promoter Zack Bissell has dedicated much of his life to being a part of this community. His work and relationships have helped form an unlikely pipeline between Japan and Sacramento.
“I think it’s important that it happens here,” Bissell said. “I think it’s fun to create this cultural exchange between Sacramento and Japan.”
Bands from Japan perform at Someone’s House
It’s a warm summer night in early August. A sizable crowd has gathered in the backyard of a house in an unassuming pocket of Oak Park. An overhang from the house is wrapped in string lights — the only light in the backyard aside from the bathroom window that flashes before a flush.
Under the overhang, band members tune their guitars and drums. A man with long straight hair covered by a trucker hat with a logo for the band Mercyful Fate on it, an early Danish black metal band, hustles around the stage making sure everything is in shape and ready to go.
That is Bissell, the booker, organizer, promoter and host for the band — they will all be going back to his house after the show to sleep in his room while he takes the couch. His band, Gentlemen Surfer, also helped open the show tonight. And unlike a traditional promoter, he will not be taking a cut of the ticket sales tonight.
The band on stage, Spoilman, traveled all the way from Tokyo.
This was the band’s second show in two nights, having just played Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland. Now, they were at Someone’s House, the inconspicuous name for the home-venue they were about to play. Frontman Shintaro Kashima is rocking a sports coat and tie in near 100-degree temperatures, but it does not damper his energy at all. The band’s gritty sound has influences from post-hardcore and other alternative rock. The audience is feeling it, moving and dancing and cheering.
After 30 minutes of raucous playing, the band moves to its next song, keeping a steady beat. Suddenly, Kashima looks up toward the overhang.
In one smooth, confident throw, he lands the guitar perfectly on top of it. Before the instrument stops ringing, Kashima, with a beer in his mouth, finds a series of ramshackle steps to hoist himself to the awning where his guitar sits. The audience watches in anticipation. He picks his guitar up and raises it to the sky, making it sing a little more. He climbs over to the roof of the house. The crowd cheers loudly. Kashima chugs the beer and then begins ripping on the guitar again sliding the can across the strings, his band playing below him. He jumps feet first from the overhang back to the grassy backyard and gets back on stage.
The creation of Japan-Sacramento music pipeline
Bissell has been putting together shows like this in Sacramento for almost nine years, bringing a mix of artists to the city with a specific focus on Japanese underground music. Shows have taken place in a mix of DIY venues around town, including the Red Museum in Mansion Flats and Café Colonial in Oak Park. Spoilman ended up at Someone’s House after the gig at another venue fell through.
It was no problem for the band or Bissell. They both had one focus — bringing cool music to people in town.
This show was not a one-off. Just the month before another Tokyo based band, The Wamecki, had played Someone’s House. In fact, this was the eighth show featuring a Japanese band in the last year. There are two more planned before year’s end.
“We didn’t really plan to bring a lot of Japanese bands to Sacramento. Japanese bands just kept seeing their friend come to Sacramento and having a good time,” said Pajan Satori, the manager of Deaf Touch records, an Asian underground label that represents many of the Japanese bands that end up in Sacramento. Satori, an LA-native now living in Taiwan, explained that all booking is community based — if a person is well connected in a scene, it will be much easier to get people into the show.
“If there was a clone of Zack in every city that I went to, my life would be so much easier.”
Who is Zack Bissell?
Bissell is a true music lover. Entering his room/office is like entering a thriving record store. Shelves of music showcase a variety of classics and ultra-rare records. By day, he is a video editor for Direct Message, a media marketing company in town. But he has other interests and responsibilities, too. For his music promotion work, he uses the project name Never Miss It!
For the last year he has also had a radio show on KUTZ FM, a local freeform radio station. He is in three bands right now, Gentleman Surfer, Dogs Barking and Quinine. Over the years he has become a stalwart for the local DIY scene, but he has fostered this relationship with Japanese underground musicians.
Bissell’s early days in the Japanese band scene
Like most, Bissell’s first exposure to Japanese culture was what he learned in grade-school history books. Around that time, he also became fascinated with the traditional Japanese folk song “Sakura, Sakura.” His love of Japanese music was borne of his love for all music.
In middle school, Bissell enjoyed classic rock bands like Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd. His musical curiosity compelled him to seek out sounds from the rest of the world.
“I started looking for bands from Japan and Sigh came up pretty quick in the search,” Bissell said.
Sigh is an experimental metal band from Tokyo that formed in 1989. He fell so in love with the band that he decided to employ his new web-coding hobby to create a website and forum for the band’s fans.
In response to the popularity of the site, the main composer for the band, Mirai Kawashima, reached out to Bissell and asked him if they could just make his site the official site for the band and if he wanted to run it. He gave an emphatic yes tand eventually went on a tour with them in 2008 as a roadie. Bissell reunited with the band this summer when it came to town on its first U.S. tour in almost 20 years.
A Davis basement show changes life’s trajectory
Bissell moved to Sacramento from the Shingle Springs area in 2009.
“There was a bunch of crazy stuff going on in Sacramento that I was really into,” he said.
That same year, he ended up in a basement somewhere in Davis to see his first house show. A local band called Who’s Your Favorite Son, God? was on the bill along with a Tokyo group called Green Milk from the Planet Orange. Bissell had become a fan of Green Milk through the Sigh forum.
“I didn’t know it then, but I stepped out of that show a different person.”
Seeing the band was a trajectory change for him. At the time, he was considering moving to a bigger city like San Francisco, but the show convinced him to plant himself and pursue music in the capital. After the show, he met the band and exchanged emails with the frontman, known as “dead k.”
Through the 2020s Bissell played in a variety of bands, including Gentlemen Surfer, for which he plays keys. He sent every album to dead k. In 2017, dead k reached out to him asking for help with booking a show in Sacramento after a long hiatus. Bissell seized the opportunity and scheduled a performance at the Red Museum, a Sacramento DIY staple.
“It was super sick to see him again,” Bissell said. “But then it felt kind of weird because over the 11 years that had passed, I had gone from being a young fan to being almost on equal footing — but I was still obsessed with him.”
Word spreads: ‘He has unified the entire underground scene’
Word from the Green Milk crew spread in the Japanese underground music scene. Shigeru Akakura from the band Loolowningen and the Far East Idiots heard how well the show went and emailed Bissell.
“Shigeru in Japan is super well-connected. He’s the biggest networker and he has unified the entire underground scene there,” Bissell said.
Since then, Loolowningen has been to Sacramento eight times. Word continued to spread among bands in the Japanese scene. A reciprocal relationship began to form there. Akakura helped Bissell organize a tour for Gentleman Surfer in Japan. He returned with his other band in which he plays bass, Dogs Barking, in 2023. Gentlemen Surfer will go back this fall.
“It’s cool going over there and hearing how fondly people speak of Sacramento. Some people kind of see it as a utopian place,” Bissell said.
The members of Tokyo band The Wamecki concurred. “People here are crazy,” frontman Tomomi Nagai said, smiling. Bissell explained that Tomi loves to crowd surf, so the smaller spaces like Golden Bear were his favorite. Ginga Naka, drummer for the band, explained that audiences in Japan tended to be a little more reserved, which could make for a less exciting performance. Here, audiences are very expressive.
When one of these bands comes to America, they are hoping to break even, but Bissell said no one is doing it to make money.
Julian Hall and Claire Tauber of Sacramento band My Pet Fossil, which toured Japan for the first time this year, echoed this sentiment, explaining that because they do not have major label backing, they had to save enough money to buy a flight and used Bissell’s connections to plan a tour.
“If you’re not going to make money anyways, you might as well do the coolest most fun option,” Hall said. The Japan tour was when he received his first request for an encore from an audience.
“There’s no way these Japanese bands would have such a positive association with Sacramento if it wasn’t for Zack going out of his way to host people here,” Tauber said.
The community has thrived off personal connections and true passion, but the network has grown wider with the help of the internet. DIY and underground music are no longer limited by proximity.
Never Miss It!’s next show is at Musiclandria at 808 O St. The Sept. 12 show will feature Tokyo band downy on its first U.S. tour. The group is joined by Sacramento bands Aphids as Lovers and Quinine, with Bissell on guitar.
