Incapacitants - 73 cd (Alchemy)
What is it about Incapacitants, I often ask myself, that inspires rhetoric bordering on the religious? Their sacred place in the Noise Canon, the grandpappies, the spiritual leaders of harsh brutality(tm)? The oft-cited zen-like, trance-inducing, quality of the listening experience? The simple fact that The Shit is Good? I am, in any case, hardly immune from them religio tendencies. To this day, the thought of Incaps entering my earholes fills my noiseheart with fear, dread, uncontainable anticipation. I look forward to each new pronouncement like it's the very last. I obsess over its teeniest minutiae, for hours, days, months, years. And in the warm afterglow of all that harsh earhole penetration, I pretend, hard, like I know what I'm talking about, when the only coherent thought I can muster is a vague amalgam of "FUCK YEAH!"
"What A Stupid Bureaucrat!!!"
Well, he'd have to be, wouldn' he? One does not with The Mikawa mess and escape intact with all one's capacities. Incapacitants make short work of this refugee from the Ministry Of Foolishness, blubbering bleat-squeals for mercy falling into progressively deafened earholes. Classic opening: mangled feedback hack sawing and ripping at jabbering, rubbernecked, squeegee-wielding, pipsqueaky. Fucker stands not a chance, so incisive this attack, so pointed its jagged rip-cisions. Such unusually heavy-handed precisions suggest a mostly single-minded affair, and it wouldn't surprise me if Kosakai chose to sit things out, ceding the floor to his obviously unhinged banker pal. As campaigns to clear the proverbial red tape go, this one quite scorches, The Mikawa sparing no savagery in administering the soundest of righteous redzone rupturings, our unfortunate bureaucratic bungler beyond hope, beyond help, beyond the pale. It takes all of seven minutes, not a second wasted in laying waste to stupidities apparent. Talk to Mikawa about breathing room? TALK TO MIKAWA ABOUT BREATHING ROOM? Er, ahem. Characterization of the gibbering public servant abovementioned does admittedly manifest, briefly, in thereminesque R2D2-wheedlings so hated by so many. And complaints over this indulgence have been duly registered by the Sewer Electorate. But you miss the point, Mr Johansson. The brutalities wielded by The Mikawa are too pointed, too barbed, too perfect in their execution-style mutilation of ozone-belching speaker cone, rabid, raw, rusted-out harmonics bristling with a barely restrained non-fidelity that saturates less and damages more.
This contrasts considerably with the fuller bodied flavorings falling into "Fund Trap", the second studio brevity. Even more classically-minded in its distribution of upper register tweakings, I'm tempted to call the work a multitracked "Libra was dead. Since then he has gon to Morgan Stanley" (from No Progress), or a fleshed out "Long Awaited" (also from No Progress), intellectually challenged bureaucrat chucked into the raging inferno for good measure, severely reduced theremin-squeegee and all. My classicist leanings make me wish the whole album sounded like this, but even the three minutes and fifty-seven seconds proferred are worth full-length investment. When, at 01:19, the full harshness kicks in, I want to start shouting and punching things in razor-raped bliss. I'm captivated, awe-struck, chasing one promising fracture-line after another. But nothing lasts, the possibilies wink out, each and every divergence consumed by massed combatitive layerings of incandescent, spasmotic, fury.
The two studio submissions are dwarfed by the two properly extended live tracks comprising the bulk of the disc. Which is really how things ought to be. For the better part of a decade,Incapacitants haven't had much of a studio presence to speak of, even as their live Incarnation has grown to one of inhuman, gargantuan, proportion. These live tracks, both from 2006, are excellent summations of Incapacitants from that period, a towering, sky-blotting-type behemoth at the top of its game: confident, assured, unhurried. And, always, all-consuming. Incaps have lately pursued a less puritannically punishing presentation, allowing once microscopic movements to mellow out and expand outward to embrace more meaty, macrophonic, layerings. Surface tensions enjoy a dynamic interplay once reserved for the most tightly constricted of screech-shackled elements. Things have loosened up. Breathing room is permitted. A diverse array of trajectories may now readily occupy the attentive worshipper.
"Don't Try This At Home", recorded at the No Music Festival (not to be confused with No Fun Fest) starts in an unassuming manner, free of catchy "harsh hooks". Instead, the first movement borders on boredom, vocal-fueled near psych-drone seemingly going nowhere. The dedicated perv will of course rise to the occasion, and as by increments an assortment of auricular tasties attaches itself to the proceedings, she will find herself, by incrememts, entranced, enslaved even, by increasingly unwieldly, constantly shape-shifting, multi-gasmic mutant overlord emergence, all splattering and spasticating through multidimensional rift in spasmic colonic fabric. If your humble writer appears here to be losing the plot, blame The Mikawa, an entity which can never be relied upon in the best of times to stick to the common story. When words cease to matter they just cease to matter. Nothing I can write, or even coherently tink, could ever begin to apprehend that cataclysmic, synapse-shattering, moment when Incaps rip the brainhole a new one. What I can say is that something happens - the brain shuts down, memory departs, a few more braincells for the trashbin. Don't ask me to explain it, but please do try this at home, again and again.
We close now with a note of pathos. A twenty-five minute ditty recorded live at Lush, Tokyo, and Dedicated To Koji Tano. That event I had the extreme pleasure of attending, lovely Lush soundsystem bringing home that lovely lush sound. What I say next may sound retarded, or more retarded than usual, but the material on disc is just as I recall from that evening - bar the odd cataclysmic moment or two. A ridiculously long, boringarse, drone-in kicks things off. Yet without quite realizing how, the brain finds itself completely absorbed, earholes gravitating toward optimum absorbtion entry points. The recording reveals relatively uncomplicated surface dynamics, progressing through a mainly midrange of fuzzywuzzzy undertones, few individual particles smashing through the overarching, rumble-heavy, grit-layers. Here invocation of Ministry Of Foolishness is more literal, the soft-edged monstrosity of MOF opener "Stone River" echoed in its hints at cruel, bottomless depths and organic, slow-rushing, currents, the brutality and horror oddly beautiful and sublimated under fathoms-thick glass. A nice salvo then for the earhole follicle thingies, and a fitting memorial for a noisist whose own sonic palate often enjoyed the same soft-edged-yet-threatening dynamic.
ANALysis:
Incapacitants, FUCK YEAH!
