Incapacitants / Geert Kohler / Priest In Shit / JSH + Anonymous Masturbaudioum - 2021 - Split

 

SoundScape 713 – none  389.71MB FLAC

A split like this works differently from a proper Incapacitants album. It does not ask for the grand historical arc, the origin story, the cassette archaeology, or the heroic Japanese noise lineage. Instead, it creates a table with several unstable devices placed on it: Incapacitants, Geert Kohler, Priest In Shit, JSH + Anonymous Masturbaudioum. The listener is not walking through one artist’s house anymore. The listener is entering a small international accident.

Discogs lists this as a 2021 split involving Incapacitants, Geert Kohler, Priest In Shit, and JSH + Anonymous Masturbaudioum, and Los Apson’s listing places it on SoundScape713 in a limited cassette edition of 100 copies. That tiny-edition cassette context matters. This is not a monumental reissue or archival box. It is a little object from the living noise underground, one of those releases that feels almost designed to be missed unless it passes through the right hands, the right search, the right blog post, the right person at the right hour.

Incapacitants’ presence gives the split its gravitational field. After hearing them across early cassette work, 1980s material, 1990s CDr detonation, and recent releases, they no longer feel like “one act among several.” They become a weather system entering a small room. Their contribution carries the familiar paradox: total overload that still somehow behaves, chaos with body language, feedback and electronics turning into a convulsive social event. Incapacitants are often described as one of the essential Japanoise projects, founded by Toshiji Mikawa in 1981, later joined by Fumio Kosakai, with a long-running commitment to feedback, vocals, and electronics as a form of “pure” noise.

But the beauty of a split is that it prevents any single artist from owning the whole meaning. Geert Kohler, Priest In Shit, and JSH + Anonymous Masturbaudioum push the release away from canon and back toward circulation. A split tape is not only music. It is a social diagram. It says: these names can sit together. These scenes, jokes, obsessions, aliases, and private methods can share magnetic tape. The result is less like a curated museum wall and more like flyers layered on a basement door.

The title-cluster is its own comedy of discomfort. Incapacitants bring the legendary absurdity. Priest In Shit drags religion straight into bodily insult. Anonymous Masturbaudioum sounds like a fake institution founded by one person with bad lighting and too much equipment. Even before listening, the release announces a refusal of respectable experimental posture. It is not interested in clean-gallery difficulty. It wants the underground to remain sticky, funny, hostile, juvenile, excessive, and alive.

That is valuable after the more formal Incapacitants posts. A 5CD box says: this matters historically. A 3LP personal rip says: this object traveled through my room and system. A new 8cm CD says: the signal is still current. This split says something else: noise is also a network of ridiculous names, small labels, limited tapes, trading energy, bedroom labels, jokes that become releases, and releases that become evidence that people are still making strange objects for each other.

The cassette format suits that perfectly. Tape has always been a natural habitat for this kind of material because it tolerates imperfection as part of the ecosystem. It does not demand the ceremonial dignity of vinyl or the archival authority of a box set. It can be dubbed, mailed, handled, damaged, forgotten, rediscovered. A limited tape of 100 copies is almost a whisper by mass-culture standards, but in noise terms it can be enough. Enough to exist. Enough to circulate. Enough to become someone’s weird little treasure.

As a Private Release post, this one feels useful because it reminds the Incapacitants run not to become too museum-lit. Incapacitants deserve the historical respect, absolutely, but they also belong to an underground that laughs, insults, collaborates, splits, mutates, and makes ugly little objects because ugly little objects are sometimes the most honest containers available.

This split is not the cathedral. It is the side room behind the venue where the table is covered in tapes, the names are half-jokes and half-threats, and the air still has enough electricity in it to make the labels curl.