I have nothing but fond memories of DHR. I was one of two people on the entire campus who was serious about grabbing everything I could from the label. And because of DHR, I stood out from the vast majority with disposable attitudes who were too shallow to care about anything else other than Top 40 radio or their unoriginal club hits. And then there’s one Christopher Jion who came with his friends to see David Hammer / Shizuo perform in Los Angeles with label-mate Annika Trost (Cobra Killer) and Ghazi (Give Up, Stereo Total). That event was well-documented in the very first issue of Mean Magazine when Atari Teenage Riot, EC8OR, and Shizuo were featured. Jion said that one night made him an electronics artist and started Replicant Impulse who enjoyed an appearance on a DHR compilation and did release several albums from 2005 to 2011.
The turn of the millennium was the last we heard of David Hammer with Shizuo No. 1 and he had plans to follow it up with No. 2 as an artist compilation. That never happened...yet. Hammer died in 2011 and us fans assumed nothing else would surface. All this time Jion had close connections with DJ Scud and assumed that the submissions were lost forever. Not so. Scud still had the original DAT tapes in his possession (with unreleased Shizuo’s material) and Jion & Crash Spader still had their own track they tried submitting with no success. The result? Shizuo No. 2 has finally become a reality.
Shizuo is dead. Long live Shizuo.