The New Blockaders & Incapacitants - 2019 - As Anti As Possible

 

4iB Records – 4iB CD/0618/033  424.06MB FLAC

As Anti As Possible is a perfect meeting title because neither side of this collaboration needs to pretend toward compatibility. The New Blockaders arrive with the old refusal engine still running: anti-music, anti-art, anti-gesture, sound as obstruction rather than expression. Incapacitants bring a different kind of extremity, the Japanese harsh-noise voltage where overload becomes almost ecstatic, where the body seems to disappear inside electrical weather. Put together, the record feels less like a collaboration in the polite sense than two demolition crews agreeing to work on the same building from opposite sides.

The historical loop is part of the charge. The New Blockaders’ early work helped mark out a zone where noise did not have to justify itself as composition, performance, protest, or catharsis. It could simply block. Incapacitants, coming from a later Japanese noise explosion that absorbed and amplified that permission, pushed harshness into a kind of continuous adrenal architecture. So As Anti As Possible is not just “UK noise meets Japanoise.” It is closer to an argument between origin and consequence, except the argument happens entirely through scrape, surge, pressure, and collapse.

What keeps this from becoming heritage noise is the lack of museum behavior. There is no softening, no elder-statesman polish, no respectful bowing at the altar. The title’s joke has teeth: “as anti as possible” sounds like a slogan, but also a dare, and maybe an admission that total negation becomes strangely alive when people keep returning to it for decades. The record is not anti in a fashionable way. It is anti as stance, anti as procedure, anti as material fact. It makes refusal feel physical.

The 4iB Records edition also matters as an object in the archive. A 2019 Singapore CD documenting a collision between British anti-sound lineage and Japanese harsh-noise force already tells a story about how global this supposedly marginal music became. What began as limited records, mail routes, rumor, and stubborn small-label culture now survives here as a FLAC file: 424MB of scraped metal inheritance and blown circuitry, still refusing to behave even after becoming data. That is the strange beauty of it. The music says no, but the archive says, yes, this too must be carried forward.