Sonic Tirade

According to their publicity material, the Tokyo-based duo Incapacitants deploy feedback, vocals and ‘various electronics’ to generate noise for the sake of noise. At their gigs, seats and tables are removed, the lights are dimmed to virtual darkness and the first sound, once they start playing, seems to drop into the room as though from a great height. Earlier this month, turning the corner into Ashwin Street in Dalston, East London, for Incapacitants’ first UK performance since 2016, I saw that the windows of Cafe OTO had been boarded up: maybe to protect the glass from the oncoming sonic boom, or to contribute to an atmosphere of induced claustrophobia – no light, no possibility of respite, as Incapacitants detonate their arsenal of electronic noise.

The project was formed in Osaka in 1981 by Toshiji Mikawa, who later moved to Tokyo where he was joined by Fumio Kosakai. Alongside bands such as Merzbow, C.C.C.C. and Hijokaidan – the genre has become known as ‘Japanoise’ – Incapacitants’ aim over the last four decades has been to fire up a sonic art freed from the influence of ‘music’. At Cafe OTO their set rolled forwards over half an hour and then they were done. They deal in short, sharp shocks.

What is the appeal of noise as a discipline distinct from music? One difference is that where music tends to build tension and then release it at moments of climax, noise performers sustain the climax indefinitely, the raw ecstasy of sound leaving the senses overwhelmed. Masami Akita, who performs as Merzbow, has equated the physical high he gets from free jazz and hardcore electronic sound with his interest in rope bondage and BDSM sex.

But noise doesn’t need to be kinky. At the start of the last century the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo nailed together instruments he termed ‘Intonarumori’. Wheels strapped to large wooden boxes, controlled by all manner of levers and pulleys, scraped against lengths of crudely cut rope to invoke the din of industrial noise and open, Russolo theorised, new doors of sonic perception. In 1913 he put his ideas into a manifesto, The Art Of Noises, but for Edgard Varèse, the French-American composer who pput fire engine sirens in his orchestral and ensemble music, Russolo was a hapless amateur with worrying predilections towards fascism. ‘The Futurists imitate, an artist transmutes,’ Varèse said – a faultline over which noise has continued to perch.

Noise, to those who involve themselves in it, has a mystical power and presence, and the problem with intentioned taste – the thing that musicians bring to the raw stuff of sound – is that it dilutes noise. Being a noise artist rests partly on knowing when to leave well alone; having the courage to set your equipment going and allow it to follow its course, intervening only as a plate-spinner might, while doing nothing that might channel the noise towards sounding like music.

All musicians who have dealt with noise, from John Cage to Cabaret Voltaire, have taken a particular view on the central question of how they allow the sound they set in motion its autonomy. One reason Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 Metal Machine Music – which opened doors into noise for Merzbow – is critically bulletproof is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than mulched together feedback and guitar noise, served up over four sides of vinyl. It’s fair enough not to like it, but the record excluded itself from any discourse about music.

Feedback is a key component of Incapacitants’ sonic tirade, too, although the duo keep the details of the tech at their disposal deliberately vague in order to maintain mystique, but also because their hardware changes and evolves with the times. Photographs posted online of their gigs are invariably accompanied by intense speculation from fans, who gleefully list the various microphones, metal sheets, ring modulators, mixers, fuzz boxes, pedals, drum machines and gazillion other gizmos they can see. The tech is used to distort, intensify and compress sound, to jolt noises into forming alliances that intentioned taste would be unlikely to conceive of.

At Café OTO, a mewling, braying cluster of roasting hot kaleidoscopic sounds pushed forwards remorselessly. The bandwidth swelled as new noises were poured into the mix. High-pitched gurgles surged to the top and were spewed out as subterranean bass sounds roared into the wilderness below.

Incapacitants’ work noticeably doesn’t countenance disjointedness and fracture, those old tricks of modernist composition and improvisation. To break the structures apart would be to ask questions of their material, which would have the inevitable consequence of shaping it musically: the tension of a question, the release of an answer. But, as Incapacitants worried their material towards its endpoint, something like a unifying tone materialised from nowhere – the sounds coalesced around it, leading to an unexpected sense of resolution at the end. A friend who went along the following night tells me that Mikawa tipped over his table of equipment as a final gesture. But after two nights there was no tour, and no further appearances. Incapacitants believe in leaving the crowd wanting more. Besides, both men have day-jobs at a bank in Toyko and needed to be home in time for work on the Monday morning.