Friday 19 May 2023

Incapacitants & Savage Gospel CD (White Centipede Noise)



Japan’s Incapacitants have been responsible for some of the most fulsome, bristling, and vibrant noise works – studio recordings but with particular renown as a live act – stretching back over 30 years. It’s often felt like a contest with only one entrant: few have been willing to try and match the efforts of Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai.

Finns Savage Gospel bring a continentally different sensibility to the exuberant rush of Incapacitants’ take on harsh noise, but have signalled a clear intent and capacity to produce dense and high volume noise works in tribute – and perhaps in competitive comparison – to the long-standing titleholders. The tundras of Finland give an immediately different sensibility to Savage Gospel’s work compared to the vibrancy of Tokyo’s bustling stimuli, even if the primal power of noise is a common fundamental: the movement and business to Savage Gospel’s work can often occur within the track rather than moving through it, creating a more solid and impenetrable sound compared to Incapacitants’ bustle, when the volume is at 11.

Savage Gospel’s CD opener “Maxihard” is suffocating even at low volume, a slowly vibrating density and seemingly constant block of sound leaving air movement for the wisps of feedback which evaporate from the central mass of oxygen-depriving sound – even as more frantic motions take place towards the rear of the textural hierarchy.  “Missing Peace” and “Shortwaving, Not Drowning” are defiantly different, hollowed-out feedback and a slow low-end boil leading “Missing Peace” to some more familiar Incapacitants-like electronics stutter, before again falling behind a curtain of more static noise which on this track is quite fuzzy and transparent. “Shortwaving, Not Drowning” too finds spatial vibration with a less overbearing frequency expanse, its more demure opening passages again exposing the sickly insides of well-abused equipment, and even its denser bliss-outs sharpening a fierce feedback edge – even finding muscular flex in its obscured mid-range.

The blanketing effect of “Maxihard” causes oxygen to slow and time start to slip, movement imagined as much as experienced. The two remaining tracks open the door and head out into the snow to spar: the cold and dark present but clinging to more discernible movement as that becomes necessary for survival. Both approaches seek to press the listener into submission, but the grim ferocity of “Maxihard” is too good for the other tracks to be quite so effective in their capability to exert pressure.

“Extreme Mother Nights” may not be prime Incapacitants but it carries much of what makes this duo so legendary in its dense and agitated sound, which is somehow both insistently thick and roomily unsettled.  The lengthy live track starts with parts of its insides showing, garish electronics, throttled voice/filter abuse, and an initial nervousness on display all giving a hesitant glimpse into the duo’s instrumentation. But barely five minutes in the set latches on to its full exuberance, variations on a slightly muffled amplifier roar providing unsettling constancy as high-end shards and feedback tempests are repeatedly conjured from the cauldron of bubbling mass.

Even proponents as skilled as the noise world’s favourite salarymen can’t continue to escalate their sound indefinitely and the second half of “Extreme Mother Nights” recognises that, turning on itself hungrily to dig out a quasi-rhythmic thread from its dense shapelessness, before repeated drillings and angry bursts of self-harming blind fury begin to hack away at the greater whole until the set consumes itself to conclude. The gruesome attacks are as fearsome as many an Incapacitants heyday recording, but are not a constant - but rather an emergent strike against the self, each time seeming to leave a bigger hole until exhaustion and self-consumption trigger a final collapse.

It's highly appropriate this CD finds its home on White Centipede Noise, the label a bastion of pure noise appreciation (in addition to being a highly valuable store/distributor) helmed by Oskar Brummel whose enthusiasm and knowledge run deep. Even with plenty of noise around on which to blow your savings, White Centipede Noise – and this CD especially – are highly deserving of your time, support, and precious earholes. It can be easy to dismiss work as imitative or less deserving than pinnacle works (which Incapacitants 1990s output clearly is), but it can also be unfair when original, engaging, and uniquely characterised recordings such as this CD are being released.

Kali Malone @ The Lab, San Francisco, 7 April 2023


My recent trip to the USA was a chance to reconnect with the depths of live underground music which I felt had eluded me since 2020 and the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world recovers so too does underground and experimental music, but the return of live events – particularly outside festival events – has been slow and selective particularly in making their way to my corner of the world. Good Friday 2023 was an opportunity to hear Kali Malone perform two works principally composed for synthesizer, with a clean and encircling surround sound provided by suitably austere San Francisco venue The Lab.

2022 LP ‘Living Torch’ was an unexpected highlight to the year for me, a pinnacle of the Portraits GRM series which has produced works from an extremely high calibre of artists so far (acknowledging, of course, the legacy of INA GRM and Editions Mego which have merged into Portraits GRM). Kali’s April 2023 set had links to the humanised solemnity of ‘Living Torch’ and the eerie refraction of this year’s ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’, while given greater spatial and dynamic movement to befit a more engaged live dynamic.

The first circa 50 minute piece of the evening, which (if my recollection is correct – a troublesome assumption) was a work yet to find its way to a recorded release, synthesised stems provided by cellist Lucy Railton as was also part of the compositional language on ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’. Initial monotonic cycles burgeoned with sympathetic layering of synthesizer tones, which then slowly opened into harmonic dispersal and strong low-end thrust – before returning to a minimal place from which to build an even stronger second quake, further shifts of synth adopting the repetitive melodic shape of the underlying string refrain. Over visuals seeming to find microscopic detail in natural elements – a clever representation of the finessing of acoustic sounds which Kali’s work often surveys – the acoustic and electronic elements rose in tempest, before a slow retreat left more fragmented cello off-cuts to bounce against one another to finally quell the extended piece.

The second work of the evening was an eight channel spatial remaining of material from ‘Living Torch’, this time using breathy woodwind tones as the track’s building blocks rather than the tensile strings of the first set. The coarse quality of the bass clarinet notes lifted into its own low grey noise which lurked at the back of the speaker space, treated orchestral lift-outs becoming further immersed with the synth treatments, also starting to peer out from the simpler stereo presentation which started while imperceptibly stacking small interval builds over its clean tones. The result traversed more complex chordalities than the first piece of the night, and was a more diffusive work as well: not done with marking puncture holes from the increasingly dense and pressured-affected acoustic stems, a patina of storm cloud distortion moved in over the increasingly unsettled drone and embraced its tumultuous tangle, urging the piece to an aggressive climax before a retreat into remnant tonalities.

To describe Kali’s performances as drone works, while somewhat true, feels somewhat dismissive and uncongratulatory. The complexity to both, while was slow in affect and trajectory, was in focus and detail on the finer edges of sound, demanding attention as much as immersion. Whether my memory has aggrandised the live works compared to Kali’s sedate recordings, or whether the live setting added an inevitable keener dynamic, I can’t now say with confidence – but regardless the care and detail to Kali’s work easily translated to a live setting and embraced the volume and space of the venue for maximum affect.