Incapacitants - Eat! Meat!! Manifesto!!!
Incapacitants - Mon, Ma? Mon!!!
Incapacitants / Pain Jerk – Live At The No Fun Fest 2007Question: who bothers to review Incapacitants these days? We all know what to expect, right? Or we did, up until things like Tight and Lon Guy plopped out, feeding the novel expectation of surprise of the less welcome kind. Quite surprisingly, then, reviews would seem to be warranted. (Hey, don't look at me. I'm in Playlist-only mode.) Reviews are warranted. Especially so when something like
Eat!Meat!!Manifesto!!! (god that hurt) gets the call. Wtf is this? More live archive/throwaway excreta? Not that I'm complaining. Eat! is more than worthy of consumption, though it tends to creep up slow-like, wide-panned feedback wooze counterbalanced by tightly constricted inner-shriek. Meat!! is just that, no filler, straight up the ass, worth it for the straight-ahead opening plunge into certain noisehole asphyxiation. A gloryhole return, if you will, to the SAME OLD SHIT. Manifesto!!! (eek) wanks about an aimless honking shithawk dialog but strives to deliver a good share of the essentials in spite of its undercooked presentation. Then it ends. Erm. Okay, so I'm complaining. This is perhaps the crux here. Much of the recent live / archive-level snuff lacks the pointed punch you'd get from your Incaps of yore; but as the attention drifts out of focus... and the sound continues to wash over (at stupidly blistering levels, 'natch), one may start to kick back and enjoy the all-consuming, high-pressured, ambiance, not so much sucked-in as living in a moment forever beyond the reach of conscious (reviewable) perception. Perhaps, at last, one is achieving the "sweet spot" described by Keretja in the Active/"authentic listening" thread -
Quotewhen one's engaged in the music without realizing it, although by the nature of this sort of "authentic listening", it's a mode of listening that one can not voluntarily get into.
Mon, Ma? Mon!!! (yerk) fares similarly. The closing ditty, recorded live 2011, clocks in at 32-fucking-minutes of completely non-directional feed-bleed and crumble... but the textures here obtained are top notch, forming and reforming in an ever shifting sea of multi-bilged heave-hurl. Truly there is "no progress" but again the defeated attention finds itself drawn back into proceedings at the least expected, most inopportune, of intervals. I was sure I was hating this shit, but now I plead the fifth. Who knows what I want (aside from trying to set a record for the most pointless rhetorical questions jammed into a single playlist blurb)? Big points are nonetheless to be awarded to the opener, "30 Years Wasted". Arse-whoop proper does not fully kick in till around the 15-minute mark, but once all the appropriate layers are in their properly-channeled screech one may recognize a legitimate compositional genius at work. Control is not being lost; perhaps it is just being soused... and then obligingly hoofed into a fetal coma.
However one may characterize the above two (relatively recent) offerings, neither really holds a candle to the Incaps half of
Live At The No Fun Fest split with Pain Jerk (2007). Clearly a crowd-pleaser in which no stops were pulled. Though credit is no doubt due the mastering work of the late, great, Kelly Churko. If this is a live recording, it has all the in-your-face presence of a proper studio jobby, all levels appropriately cranked well into the appropriate earbleed pressures. There are even a couple weird intervals where Mikawa's un-effected, spasticating, vocals are strangely way up in the mix- just to heighten the feel of insane-banker-on-crack going straight for the jugular. This is a man who clearly does not want to buy samurai bond. Well done, team. Pain Jerk then proceeds to rip Hello America a new asshole, and I am only boycotting further comment out of irritation at the liner notes calling this 33-minute piece an "excerpt". But, well, okay. Comment: what Gomi lacks in layered densities he makes up for in pointed scorch. The most pointed of attacks over the lengthy course are incisive, brutal, a hearty fuck yes from edit to edit. Fuckers.
Hijokaidan - The Last Recording Album
Hijokaidan Featuring Akira Sakata - Made In Studio
Borbetomagus & Hijokaidan - Both Noises End BurningWhenever I'm tempted to question the impact of The Mikawa, I bend the pages of yet another chapter in the neverending story of the king of noise. Here Mikawa's contributions are as vague as a smoked-filled noise hellhole, often reduced to a flat-out , texturizing, harshness. And this is no more apparent than in
The Last Recording Album. Diverging somewhat from prior Hijos, the component parts are clearly separated, well-defined, practically gleaming. Unlike a lot of prior Hijos, Jojo's diesel-powered guitar work really dominates. This is a very good-if-rather-pedarestrian sound for the most part, but it is also apparent that without the severe, Mikawa (and Kosakai!)-mediated scorcheries occupying the periphery, this could begin to approach something I might be tempted to dub free jazz rodent torture. There are some great moments, particularly toward the end of the two bulky freak-out tracks book-ending the five-track offering. In these moments a noticeable pick-up of intensities may be discerned, and The Mikawa (and The Fumio!) is allowed to bleed a little bit more freely into the earhole. (Or so I would like to imagine.) The middling three "experimental" tracks show that the Kaidan are not without some range- "The Dodge Ball Gourmet" a kind of free noise kabuki holocaust and "Astounding Guitar, Amazing Noise" - aside from being an(other) awesome title – could describe the slow snuffing out of miniscule, hiccuping, chipmunk via generous slathering of ambient (Diesel) Guitar noise-drone.
A natural progression from here would seem to be
Made In Studio, featuring the rather dominating sax of Akira Sakata. I dig this shit, it's been quite a while since sax crept into the Hijo sound, and a good dose of shriek-laced bell-action certainly wouldn't sound out of place against Junko's banshee'd lung-chords. Hijokaidan seem to agree as Junko and Sakata are given five minutes to duke it out to refreshingly punchy effect. One of the better Junko pairings I've heard. A Kosakai-Mikawa-Sakata three-way is even more shock-provoking in its unabashed restraint; the Incaps duo are too polite for their own good- would've been better if someone started shrieking, "Daddy, take a banana. Tomorrow's Sunday!" Of course, it is the more trad Hijo which takes first prize, the principle 30-minute closer featuring the whole five-piece gang (plus Kosakai! What the big guy adds I couldn't say. Presence, maybe.) I suspect something like this would be pretty awesome to take in live. On disc, a nice little breather.
While I'm onto this saxnoise thing, I thought I'd see how Made In Studio compares to
Both Noises End Burning from Borbetomagus & Hijokaidan. Fuck, this is a beast. Seventy-two minutes of pure blowhard mayhem. Again, I would have to say- the Japanese contingent are too damn polite. Mssrs Sauter, Dietrich, and Miller clearly get free reign to set the tone, conjuring monstrously dense, amorphous, smoke-scapes through which the Hijo perversions are allowed poke and prod. A kind of Hijosandwhich, really, perhaps to be served up with "Noisedelicatessan"? For the discerning connoisseur, I'm not sure I can comment on the tastefulness of this neverending jam session. But I can say that previous comparisons I've offered to the Borbeto smash hit "Live In Tokyo" are probably still defensible. The abovementioned smoke-scapes, filled with (comparatively) lower-pitched feeding-back saxfields, billow, belch, and bulge ever so slowly while the inward-concentrated Hijos frantically shred with almighty, shitting-oneself, fervor. And despite the presence this time of
two saxes, and the absense of one Kosakai, net effects are significantly more psychedelic, and significantly less jazz-tinted, than Made In Studio. So there.
