Oxen Man’s Uneasiness has a title that feels both ridiculous and exactly right. It sounds like a folk riddle, a medical complaint, a cartoon curse, and a private joke written on the side of a malfunctioning machine. That oddness matters. Incapacitants have always carried comedy inside catastrophe. Their noise is extreme, but not solemn in the dead institutional sense. It has convulsion, grin, panic, and human absurdity burning through the circuitry.
Released in January 2023 by the American noise label Oxen, the CD contains four long pieces: “Olly Olly Oxen Free,” “Real Thrill Of Bulky Trash,” “Erebosis,” and “Earthdamned.” Tobira describes it as an hour-long noise-scape from the Tokyo duo, packaged in a digipack, with original artwork/design by Kevin Donald McEleney and mastering by Grant Richardson. That one-hour structure gives the release a clean frame, but the sound inside remains gloriously unhousebroken.
The Oxen label text is useful because it hears the album as motion and mass: panning swells, particles blasted into towers of free-form dissonance, an oceanic force, and a final shore-break of static energy. That language fits Incapacitants because their music often behaves less like a wall than weather under criminal pressure. It surges, tilts, erupts, collapses, floods, and keeps returning with no respect for ordinary proportion.
What makes Oxen Man’s Uneasiness especially strong in this run is that it does not sound like late-career weakening. It sounds like persistence without nostalgia. Incapacitants began in 1981 as Toshiji Mikawa’s solo project in Osaka, with Fumio Kosakai joining after Mikawa relocated to Tokyo. The duo’s stated aim has often been summarized as producing “pure” noise, resisting ordinary musical ideas and even the sense of human intention, through feedback, vocals, and electronics. Decades later, that impossible aim still gives the work its strange nobility.
The track titles keep the office-joke / apocalypse-joke / playground-joke machinery alive. “Olly Olly Oxen Free” turns a children’s game call into a noise invocation. “Real Thrill Of Bulky Trash” sounds like an ecstatic garbage collection notice. “Erebosis” points toward darkness as condition or process. “Earthdamned” lands like a final planetary insult. Incapacitants titles often have this weird talent: they refuse dignity while making the music feel even larger. The joke does not shrink the sound. It prevents it from becoming pompous.
That is important because harsh noise can become ceremonial in the wrong way. It can start wearing its extremity like a uniform. Incapacitants avoid that trap by sounding too alive, too unstable, too unserious-serious to become merely grand. The overload is real, but it has motion, laughter, stamina, bodily pressure. It feels generated by humans pushing machines past etiquette, not by a genre reenacting itself for collectors.
As an archive entry, Oxen Man’s Uneasiness completes a beautiful historical arc. The early cassette material shows the first sparks. Project Pallo ’85 shows the handmade underground becoming a reissue object and then your personal rip. Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 shows the mature duo in late-1990s detonation mode. Oxen Man’s Uneasiness proves the signal has not become archival only. It is still being emitted.
That may be the best reason to place it in the run. An artist archive should not only move backward toward origins. It should also show that some origins are still active. Incapacitants are not a dead language preserved in expensive boxes. They are a still-dangerous weather system with a sense of humor and no clear intention of behaving.
Oxen Man’s Uneasiness is the sound of the oxen being called home, except the field is feedback, the farmer is electricity, and the gate has melted.
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