You can track the history of Incapacitants, the duo of Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai, back to the early 1980s, and a clutch of cassettes on Pariah Tapes, at that time recorded solo by Mikawa. Kosakai joined later, after the former had relocated from Osaka to Tokyo. Incapacitants have always offered a particularly pure, focused exploration of Japanese noise’s aesthetics – there’s a depth and heaviness to their sound that feels inescapable, a kind of dense weight on the chest. Part of their reputation, though, rests on the juxtaposition between the intensity of their art, its abject presence, and Mikawa and Kosakai’s workaday, salary-man presentation and jobs: Mikawa’s role as a bank employee is well-known within noise circles and provides part of the duo’s intrigue, though those seeming juxtapositions run across the board in noise culture – it’s simply a particularly canny move to play on it. This clip from 1991, in Tajima, Fukushima, seems like just the right context in which to catch Incapacitants, breaking into the furious hush of the environment with a particularly raw, rigorous set of tightly coiled electronics, and post-free-jazz blasts.