Encounter When Pigs Fly begins with an impossible event and spends nearly an hour making impossibility feel physically unavoidable. Toshiji Mikawa’s two long pieces carry absurd, almost storybook titles, but the music itself has none of the wink normally attached to a flying pig. This is high-frequency harsh noise sharpened until the air seems toxic. Electronics squeal, swarm and fracture across the stereo field while lower currents keep the sound from floating away into pure treble. The cassette’s subtitle-sized concept, a “jungle-poison-nettle theme,” proves unexpectedly exact. These recordings do not resemble a scenic journey through lush greenery. They behave like hostile vegetation closing around the listener, every surface armed with barbs, hairs and chemical defenses. Released by Grubenwehr Freiburg in November 2024 as a C60 cassette, Encounter When Pigs Fly contains two side-long works: “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” and “Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing.”
“Onaonga Above Forest Limit” takes its name from a New Zealand tree nettle known for a sting far beyond the irritation caused by common garden varieties. The title removes the plant from its expected environment and places it above the forest limit, exposed where it should not be able to grow. Mikawa’s noise operates through the same contradiction. The piece feels overgrown and claustrophobic, yet its frequencies often seem suspended in a bare, elevated space. Dense electronic movement crowds the foreground while thin whistles and shrieks cut above it like signals traveling across open rock. The sound is simultaneously tangled and exposed.
Mikawa’s high frequencies are not a decorative glaze placed over a conventional harsh-noise mass. They determine the composition’s nervous system. Long squeals appear to narrow, split and grind against neighboring tones. Smaller bursts flicker underneath, continually changing the apparent grain of the larger field. At moments, the piece seems dominated by one sustained electronic scream, but closer listening reveals dozens of tiny abrasions moving through it. The noise is never truly static. It shivers, scratches and recoils.
That unstable movement is essential to Mikawa’s work. His long history with Incapacitants may encourage expectations of complete overload, but the duo’s force has always depended upon more than sheer density. Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai create noise that behaves almost improvisationally, even at maximum volume. Frequencies collide, redirect one another and produce accidental openings before those openings are crushed again. On Encounter When Pigs Fly, Mikawa preserves that sense of live reaction while working alone. Every sound seems to provoke another response somewhere else in the system.
The first side therefore feels less like a wall than a thicket. A wall has one primary relationship with the body: it blocks passage. A thicket catches clothing, scratches skin and redirects movement in hundreds of small ways. “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” continually snags attention. A piercing tone dominates for several seconds, then a rougher electronic vibration rises beneath it. A thin gap appears, only to reveal another layer operating farther back. The listener cannot locate one stable surface against which to brace.
Mikawa also avoids the dramatic vocabulary of crescendo and release. The piece begins inside active pressure and remains there, changing texture without offering an obvious destination. Harsh noise often becomes predictable when every passage is arranged as a climb toward maximum saturation. Here, saturation is merely one condition among several. The sound may thicken, but it can also become more brittle, more dispersed or more painfully narrow. Intensity is measured through concentration as much as volume.
“Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing” moves the setting to Australia and names another notorious stinging plant. The Gympie-Gympie tree carries fine hairs capable of producing severe pain that may persist long after contact. “Bushbashing” means forcing a route through dense country without the aid of a clear trail. The title turns the second side into an almost comically disastrous expedition: charging blindly through vegetation equipped to punish the smallest touch.
The sound is correspondingly more frantic. Where “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” often creates a hovering, exposed pressure, “Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing” feels tangled at ground level. Electronic bursts collide more abruptly, and the texture seems filled with short, hooked movements. High frequencies still dominate, but they are interrupted by rougher surges and shifting low-end pressure. The piece does not glide through its environment. It hacks, stumbles and becomes increasingly embedded in it.
The plant theme gives Mikawa’s abrasive sound an unusually precise physical metaphor. These frequencies do not strike like blunt machinery. They sting. The sensation continues after an individual tone has disappeared because the ear remains sensitized, waiting for the next sharp contact. A sudden narrow squeal can feel more invasive than a broad blast of distortion. Mikawa understands that pain is not always produced by scale. It can come from accuracy.
This makes Encounter When Pigs Fly distinct from noise that relies upon a massive low-frequency foundation. The cassette certainly possesses weight, but its threat is concentrated higher in the spectrum. Played loudly, the upper frequencies create immediate physical tension around the jaw, forehead and inner ear. Played at lower volume, their shapes become easier to follow, revealing the rapid decisions hidden inside the apparent chaos. The work rewards both bodily exposure and analytical attention, though neither listening position makes it comfortable.
The cassette format suits this material because tape slightly roughens the sharpest edges without neutralizing them. Analog hiss joins the finer electronic activity, making it difficult to determine where the recording ends and the medium begins. The two half-hour sides also impose a useful symmetry. Each plant receives its own enclosed habitat, and turning the cassette becomes a geographic transfer from one poisonous landscape to another. The physical reel movement gives the pieces a visible progression even when their internal motion rejects conventional development.
Grubenwehr Freiburg describes the release simply as “cacophonous and high-frequency harshnoise with jungle-poison-nettle theme,” a description that sounds almost playful until the recording begins applying those words with brutal literalism. The theme could have remained a novelty, but Mikawa uses it to clarify his approach to sound. These are not heroic electronic avalanches descending from above. They are living defensive systems. Every texture appears designed to prevent handling.
The title Encounter When Pigs Fly adds another layer of absurdity. “When pigs fly” normally dismisses an event as impossible, but an encounter suggests that the impossible thing has already arrived and occupies the same space as the listener. Mikawa’s noise repeatedly creates that sensation. Sounds seem to violate ordinary scale and location. A tiny electrical crackle expands until it feels environmental. A distant shriek suddenly occupies the foreground. Several incompatible depths exist simultaneously, turning the stereo field into an impossible habitat.
This spatial confusion is one reason the album never reduces to technical aggression. Mikawa is not only producing abrasive frequencies. He is arranging distances, densities and points of contact. His electronics create a landscape without naturalistic field recordings, melody or descriptive narration. The plants exist through behavior. The noise catches, penetrates, swarms and persists.
Encounter When Pigs Fly does not reinvent Toshiji Mikawa’s vocabulary, but it concentrates that vocabulary around an unusually coherent idea. The two pieces transform high-frequency harsh noise into ecological hostility, finding a meeting point between absurd titles and severe physical sensation. The cassette begins with an impossible encounter, crosses two continents of poisonous vegetation and ends without discovering a safe path through either one.
What remains after the tape stops is the record’s most convincing connection to its nettle theme. The sound does not vanish cleanly. Its sharpest frequencies leave an afterimage in the ear, a phantom irritation that continues after contact has ended. Mikawa turns listening into bushbashing: forward motion without a trail, every apparent opening concealing another hooked surface, and the growing realization that the landscape is not attacking randomly. It was built to resist passage.
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