Incapacitants - Live at the UFO Club 09.17 - Tokyo by Bloom 09.29.06
So you say you want in, a little more coverage of the goings-ons in the secluded, somewhat understood yet largely misread world of the Nipponese Underground Scene...

Well, okay (like there'd be anything to be gained if I refused), but first you got to know where it's coming from... a lot of this music is characterized by extremes, most famously as being at times extremely loud (though there are also moments and passages of extreme elegance, melody, composition, dark otherworldly trippiness, etc)...

KNOW THIS BROTHER, THERE IS SOME HEAVY DUTY EXORCISIZING THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE HERE, and LOUD volume is one solution which is suggested on numerous recorded and live occasions.

Question: What's with the exorcising, isn't japan a nice, adorable country where, despite the occasional cult group poison attack, group harmony, Puffy, cute high school prostitutes, and skillful pastiches of Blue Cheer and metal (yes, THAT BAND isn't necessarily loved by everyone here, OK!?) rule the roost?

Answer: There's too much to say here in response to that, let's just say that things aren't really rosy at all, not if one citizen every 15 minutes takes their own life...if you want to get closer to the real issues, have a look at "Gold Warriors" by Sterling Seagrave, or Google "NHK's Finest Hour:Japan's Official Record of Chinese Forced Labor", by William Underwood... suffice it to say that the proclivity towards eardrum-abuse stems from a genuine need to erase something unpalatable from one's soul, even if it means industrial-strength scouring of one's viscera via heavy-duty aural assault.

So enter a unit named Incapacitants, made up of two members (Mikawa & Kosakai) of the seminal noise band Hijokaidan ("Emergency Exit Staircase"). The other night they took the stage at the UFO club and, hey, who needs verse/chorus, or indeed any semblance of musical structure, these 40/50-something mild-mannered looking gents dropped all pretences of polite conversation and proceeded to just pulverize the audience with waves of unrelenting violence, Mr. Mikawa manning a massive bank of various machines, and Mr. Kosakai stumbling around frantically-spased as though the home-made feedback-spewing guitar pick-ups hooked up to more mountains of machines were issuing him increasingly larger amounts of massive electric jolts.

Now, me usually being more pre-disposed towards a good book than an
all-night crack binge, I didn't initially take to the spectacle of seeing St. Vitus' dance where I would prefer some tasty/spacey expolation or hard, shape-shifting groovey progressions...but, hey, these guys are from Hijokaidan, I gotta open up a little..while I started to adjust my settings the whole scene before my eyes began to decompose and ingest itself...sporadic hollars from the audience brought forth regular guttural scream-and-response...which sure enough in their turn encouraged some jostling of bodies, which in due time transformed into your fully-formed, frothy mosh-pit, people just going mind-numbing banana-shit beserko and shoving each other from one side of the room to the other, pulling, scratching, and yelling in each other's faces.

If you've ever been here for any appreciable amount of time (or if you have any Japanese friends who aren't of the head-case variety), you'll know that this doesn't really happen here, in other words there will always be a line of decorum. Here that line truly did vanish, with the ensuing result being that after the gig there were a variety of expressions and people in differing states of ecstasy and exasperation. It wasn't so much that the noise had on its own cultivated new avenues of thought and expression, it was more like a bunch of people were looking for something to jettison some unnameable, hideous life-sucking creature from out of the bowels of their fettered minds, something to unleash some monster more terrible and savage from within themselves to battle and devour the demon enforced from without,so that they could be left in peace, peace from the irony of virtual slavery in the world's second-strongest economy, peace from the incessant chatterings of politely vacant brand-obsessed animation people, peace from a denuded culture whose capability has been reduced by design to serve up pastiches of Disney, Hollywood and MLB (and countless other 'superior' forms of culture), peace from a convenient world where all the boundaries are drawn, and the only way of escape is... annihilation.

by bloom from the bloom-creation
www.myspace.com/bloomintokyo2