Cryptofascisme - 2017 - La Mort Visible & La Mort Invisible Pt. 1: Reggane - In Ekker

Yes Divulgation – none  296.99MB FLAC

La Mort Visible & La Mort Invisible Pt.1: Reggane - In Ekker is the kind of release where the title does not sit on top of the music. It excavates under it. Cryptofascisme is already a loaded name, half-political diagnosis and half-underground warning label. Then the subtitle points directly toward Reggane and In Ekker, two French nuclear test sites in Algeria. Suddenly the album is not just “noise” as texture. It is noise as historical residue.

That context matters. Reggane, in the Algerian Sahara, was the site of France’s first nuclear weapons tests beginning in 1960. In Ekker later became a major underground test site, including the infamous 1962 Béryl accident, when an underground nuclear test released radioactive material and exposed military personnel, officials, and local populations. The phrase “visible death and invisible death” becomes painfully precise. There is the spectacular death everyone can imagine: blast, fire, military image, desert cloud. Then there is the invisible death: contamination, fallout, illness, secrecy, documents, long latency, consequences carried quietly through bodies and soil.

Cryptofascisme’s 2017 cassette, originally issued through Yes Divulgation, takes that history and refuses to turn it into a clean educational object. It does not behave like documentary in the polite sense. The two sides are simply “Face A” and “Face B,” which gives the tape a severe, almost archival blankness. No sentimental titles. No obvious narrative guidance. Just two faces of a wound.

That blankness is powerful because nuclear violence is partly a war against perception. The visible event happens once. The invisible event continues. Radiation has no dramatic face until it has already entered consequence. Bureaucracies prefer that kind of violence because it can be delayed, denied, statistically managed, buried in reports, or blamed on uncertainty. Noise is an appropriate language for this because noise can represent both excess and erasure. Too much signal. Not enough evidence. A history screaming behind a wall.

The name Cryptofascisme adds another layer. “Crypto-fascism” suggests power that hides its shape, authoritarian force disguised under respectable language, violence buried inside administrative procedure, nationalism or colonialism wearing a technical mask. In this context, the word does not need to be used as a slogan. It becomes a method of reading. Nuclear testing in colonized or formerly colonized territory is not only scientific experimentation. It is geography chosen by power. It is whose desert can be turned into a laboratory, whose bodies can be made statistically distant, whose future can be treated as acceptable collateral.

The music, then, does not need to imitate explosions. In fact, the stronger choice is to avoid simple drama. Industrial/noise work tied to histories like this gains force when it suggests process: drone as contamination, distortion as dust, repetition as bureaucracy, low pressure as buried matter, sudden harshness as rupture. The listener is not placed at the cinematic center of the blast. The listener is placed afterward, inside the continuing field.

This is where the tape format matters. A cassette is a fragile carrier of magnetic information, always vulnerable to hiss, wear, warble, copying, decay. That makes it an oddly fitting vessel for a work about invisible traces. The medium itself speaks in residue. It does not deliver pristine truth. It carries damage forward in a form that can be duplicated, mislaid, rediscovered, and reissued.

The later 2022 Dogmatics In Outline 2CS boxset reinforces that archival movement by pairing the first part with the second part, which was recorded during 2017 and 2018. Sentimental Youth lists the box as a 2022 Dogmatics In Outline release in the noise genre, while the Bandcamp page for part two notes that it appeared in the box with a reissue of the first part. The work therefore has two lives: first as a 2017 statement, then as a gathered historical object five years later.

Inside the Private Release sequence, this feels like a major pivot away from the theatrical darkness of Cold Meat Industry. The darkness here is not infernal, erotic, occult, or martial. It is geopolitical. It is postcolonial. It is environmental. It is scientific language turned lethal. That may be why it feels more immediately alive, even if the subject is decades old. The twentieth century never ended cleanly. Its tests are still running inside the ground.

La Mort Visible & La Mort Invisible is valuable because it understands that some horrors do not become less real when they become less visible. They become harder to accuse. Noise, at its best, can accuse without pretending to solve. It can make a field unstable. It can make silence sound contaminated.

This tape does not explain Reggane and In Ekker. It points toward them and lets the desert hum.

Gate To Gate - 2005 - I Turn Black Keys

 

PACrec – PACrec113  612.34MB FLAC

I Turn Black Keys is a title with a perfect double edge. It sounds musical at first, like a hand moving toward a piano, but the phrase immediately darkens. The keys do not play black notes. They are turned black. Something has happened to the instrument, or to the lock, or to the act of access itself. Gate To Gate take that ambiguity and drag it through almost eighty minutes of blackened noise, drone, percussion, and suffocated industrial atmosphere.

Gate To Gate was the collaboration of Greh Holger, known for Hive Mind and Chondritic Sound, and Mike Connelly of Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, and Gods of Thundra. That pairing already suggests a meeting of two Michigan-adjacent underground nerve systems: Holger’s heavy electronic dread and Connelly’s feral noise-rock/industrial damage. Released in 2005 by PACrec and Troniks, I Turn Black Keys gathered two earlier cassette releases in remastered form and added a new thirty-eight-minute title piece. Vital Weekly described it as “almost eighty minutes” on the darker side of the noise spectrum, with the new piece moving from muffled tone into feedback and buried percussion while remaining “pitch black.”

That structure matters because the disc is not only an album. It is a transition document. The massive opening title track feels like a new tunnel being bored through the earlier material. It is long, airless, and stubborn. Rather than explode in clean harsh-noise fashion, it seems to sink, thicken, and clog. The sound has weight but not release. Feedback and percussion appear as shapes trapped in tar, trying to move through an environment that keeps absorbing them.

The remaining pieces, “Bane” and “House With The Clocks In Its Walls,” come from earlier cassette material, and that origin remains audible in the best way. They feel more torn open, more unstable, less monolithic than the title track. Guts of Darkness lists the CD as five tracks, with the title piece at 37:58, two “Bane” parts around ten minutes each, and two “House With The Clocks In Its Walls” parts around eleven minutes each. It also notes the cardboard sleeve and an edition of 1000 copies, which gives the release that mid-2000s noise-object quality: substantial enough to circulate, limited enough to feel like a door you had to know existed.

What separates this from simple “dark noise” is the sense of pressure management. Gate To Gate do not just pile distortion until the room fills. They work with occlusion. Sounds are hidden inside other sounds. Percussion does not always strike forward; sometimes it seems to happen behind a wall. The drones are not smooth atmospheres but contaminated weather. The black metal element is present less as riffing than as temperature: thin shriek, suffocation, hostile air, a refusal of brightness.

There is something interesting about hearing this after Barn Sour. Barn Sour lets weirdness remain bodily, comic, rural, half-domestic. Gate To Gate removes the joke and turns the space inward. The body is still present, but more as pressure, breath, impact, and panic. If Barn Sour makes the barn strange, Gate To Gate makes the cellar endless.

The title “House With The Clocks In Its Walls” also gives the record one of its strongest images. Time is not outside the structure. It is embedded in the walls, ticking where it cannot be reached. That feels right for this album’s relationship to old cassette material. The earlier recordings are not merely bonus tracks. They are clocks inside the house, still running underneath the newer title piece. The CD becomes a building where multiple moments of the project coexist: tape past, remastered present, new long-form statement, and later blog rediscovery.

As an archive entry, I Turn Black Keys fits beautifully because it belongs to a period when noise, black metal texture, drone, and cassette-culture ritual were feeding one another without needing clean genre permission. It is not a polished dark ambient record, not a straight harsh noise disc, not metal in the usual sense. It is a black room with equipment left on, and somewhere inside that room the door keeps changing location.

This is not easy listening, but it is not empty punishment either. Its value is in the density, the refusal of easy climax, the way it makes darkness feel material rather than symbolic. Gate To Gate do not point at the void. They pack the void into a small room and let it sweat through the walls.

Incapacitants - 2019 - Project Pallo '85 3xLP

Urashima ‎– 136  1.18GB FLAC

Project Pallo ’85 is not only an Incapacitants reissue. In this archive, it is a physical encounter that became digital evidence. That matters. A personal rip carries a different kind of charge than a downloaded file. It is not automatically “better” in some simple purity contest, but it is more embodied. The record had to be acquired, opened, played, captured, checked, named, uploaded. The sound passed through a room, a system, a person, a decision. The archive did not merely receive it. It metabolized it.

The release itself already has that historical gravity. Project Pallo ’85 was originally issued in 1985 by Pariah Tapes as a triple-cassette handmade box, and Urashima’s 2019 edition presented it as the first vinyl reissue, remastered by Andrea Marutti and pressed as a 3LP box in a limited numbered edition of 299 copies. The Urashima notes describe the set as black 140-gram vinyl housed in a grey wooden box with laser engraving, three 30x30 cm cardboard inserts from the original box cover art, a dragon drawing by Takuya Sakaguchi, and the original insert. That is not packaging as decoration. That is packaging as resurrection apparatus.

Incapacitants occupy a special place in Japanese noise because their extremity is not just loudness. Toshiji Mikawa began the project in Osaka in 1981, and Fumio Kosakai later joined after Mikawa moved to Tokyo. Both men are famously associated with work lives outside the expected rock/noise mythology: Mikawa in banking and securities, Kosakai as a government office worker. That biographical detail has followed them for decades because it makes the music seem even stranger. This is not the fantasy of total outsider collapse. It is noise made by people who could walk through ordinary bureaucratic life and then generate storms of impossible saturation.

That contrast is part of the power of Project Pallo ’85. The music does not sound like rebellion in a tidy cultural sense. It sounds like overload as a way of being. The tracks are long, volatile, and almost absurdly committed: “Pallo 1 ‘Receita’ A Jaapsoc,” “Leprosy,” “Manic-Depressive,” “Pallo 2 ‘Quiet Sound’,” “Peony Crackers 2,” “Irrevocable Letter of Credit,” “Pallo 3 ‘To Die Key’,” “Living Zombie Is About To Die,” and “Long Awaited.” Even the titles swing between illness, finance, deadpan joke, and collapse, which is exactly the kind of collision Incapacitants make audible.

What makes this music remain alive is that it refuses to resolve into a single image of “harsh noise.” Incapacitants are often treated as one of the purest examples of full-force noise performance, but the best listening happens when the ear stops hearing only density and begins noticing behavior. The sound swells, buckles, sprays, folds back, flickers, overloads, and surges again. It is ecstatic without being pretty, disciplined without sounding controlled, funny without becoming a joke. It is the sound of two people pushing instability until instability becomes form.

There is something almost devotional in that commitment. Not devotional in a peaceful sense, but in the sense of total offering. Incapacitants do not dabble in noise as texture. They submit to it as a condition. The listener is not given a neat route through the material. Instead, the record demands a different listening organ, one less interested in melody or narrative and more willing to track force, grain, pressure, and psychic stamina.

The 3LP format makes the scale physical again. Noise on vinyl is always a little paradoxical: an art of overload cut into a fragile mechanical groove, chaos made to travel by needle. With a triple LP box, the listener has to keep returning to the object, flipping sides, handling the sequence, respecting duration. That ritual slows down what a file can make frictionless. Your personal rip sits right at that crossing. The vinyl ritual becomes digital circulation. The handmade box’s descendant becomes a blog post. The private object becomes a public release.

That is why this upload belongs to the core of the project. It joins several histories at once: 1985 Japanese cassette noise, 2019 Italian archival reissue culture, your own physical media practice, and the blog as a strange public mailbox for extreme sound. The post is not only saying, “Here is Incapacitants.” It is saying, “Here is how an object moved through time, through labels, formats, hands, machines, and finally into this archive.”

After the recent run of downloaded posts, this personal rip also clarifies something important: the archive has never been one method. It is a changing relationship to access. Sometimes the source is a box set in the room. Sometimes the source is a file found after life has made the old room unreachable. Sometimes the act is preservation, sometimes continuation, sometimes survival, sometimes sharing the thing because it would be wrong for the signal to stop.

Project Pallo ’85 can withstand all of that because the music itself is already a survival form. It is sound refusing containment while constantly being contained: cassette, box, LP, rip, post. Every container fails a little. Every container succeeds enough to pass it forward.

That may be the deepest pleasure of this upload. Incapacitants make music that seems impossible to hold, yet here it is, held again.

Incapacitants - 1999 - Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130

Usagi – U01  395.08MB FLAC

 Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 sounds like a title created by committee accident: technical, bureaucratic, catastrophic, and somehow funny. That is very Incapacitants. Their noise often feels like a system failure that has become ecstatic, but the titles keep one shoe in the office: assets, liabilities, standards, credit, operations. It is not noise as fantasy apocalypse. It is noise as clerical disaster, finance-room seizure, paperwork catching fire from inside the copier.

Originally released as a 1999 CDr on the UK label Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 later returned as a 2021 CD reissue on the Swedish label Usagi in an edition of 300 copies. Discogs lists the original as a single-track 1999 CDr and the reissue as a CD album, which gives the release one of those useful underground double-lives: first as a small-circulation object, then as a recovered document for listeners who missed the initial blast radius.

The date-code in the title matters: 990130. January 30, 1999. Whether heard as live document, event marker, or simply part of the release’s internal labeling, it pins the noise to a moment. Incapacitants’ music can feel so total that time almost disappears while it plays, but the title brings time back with a stamp. This happened. This operation was unauthorized. Something fatal occurred in the machinery.

What makes Incapacitants different from many harsh noise projects is that their sound is not merely a wall. It is activity. Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai do not produce blank density so much as convulsive density: feedback, electronics, vocal eruptions, unstable surges, sudden collapses, and pressure changes moving so rapidly that the ear has to abandon normal tracking and begin listening for behavior. The group’s stated aim has often been described as producing “pure” noise, using feedback, vocals, and electronics while rejecting ordinary musical intention. That idea can sound theoretical until the music begins. Then it becomes practical. The record does not want melody, development, or atmosphere in the familiar sense. It wants force in motion.

Hearing this after Project Pallo ’85 is especially useful. Pallo carries the early mythic charge: cassette-era Japanese noise, handmade object, Urashima resurrection, and your own personal rip transforming a physical 3LP box into a blog artifact. Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 moves the focus into the late 1990s, where Incapacitants already sound fully themselves: not searching for a language, but detonating inside it. The earlier material shows source energy. This one shows persistence, stamina, and refinement without politeness.

There is an odd kind of discipline here. To casual ears, Incapacitants may sound like everything happening at once, but long exposure reveals control of another kind. Not control as restraint, but control as commitment. The duo stays inside extremity long enough for extremity to stop being a stunt and become an environment. Noise becomes not an explosion, but weather with intent. The listener is not asked to admire a clever structure. The listener is asked to survive contact with a field of unstable electricity and then notice that the field has internal life.

This is where your decision to move Project Pallo ’85 into the artist run becomes meaningful. Incapacitants reward clustering. A single post can be overwhelming. A sequence reveals humor, history, labor, format, and recurrence. The joke of these office/financial/operational titles begins to glow brighter beside the reality of the sound. Mikawa’s association with banking and Kosakai’s government-office work have become part of the group’s mythology, not because biography explains the music, but because it intensifies the contradiction: ordinary administrative life on one side, ecstatic electronic obliteration on the other.

As an archive object, Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 also sits beautifully between scarcity and circulation. A 1999 CDr is vulnerable: small edition, easy to lose, easy to misfile, easy to become rumor. A later reissue stabilizes it. A blog post sends it traveling again. Every format changes the encounter. The music remains absurdly resistant to containment, but it keeps accepting containers anyway: CDr, CD, rip, upload, search result, listener memory.

That may be the secret comedy of Incapacitants. The sound behaves like it wants to destroy all systems, yet it survives through systems: labels, catalog numbers, formats, databases, collectors, rippers, archives. The fatal operation was unauthorized, but somehow the paperwork kept moving.

Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 is not only harsh noise. It is harsh noise with a timestamp, a clerical wound, and a grin buried somewhere deep in the overload.

Incapacitants - 2006 - Pariah Tapes 5xCD Box Set

 

Freak Animal Records – Freak-CD-034  2.69GB FLAC

Pariah Tapes is one of those archival releases where the title means exactly what it says and much more than it says. This is Incapacitants before they became an internationally recognized name in Japanese noise, before the duo identity hardened into legend, before later CD and LP reissues made the early work easier to locate. It is the sound of the project’s first private weather systems being dragged back into circulation.

Released in 2006 by Freak Animal Records as a limited 5CD remastered box set, Pariah Tapes collects the oldest Incapacitants cassette releases from Toshiji Mikawa’s own early-1980s Pariah Tapes label. JapanImprov notes that the first two CDs were originally issued in the early 1980s as a 90-minute cassette, which immediately gives the box its archaeological force. These are not bonus fragments from a famous group’s mature period. These are source documents: rough, excessive, handmade, and historically charged.

That matters inside this artist run because Pariah Tapes gives Project Pallo ’85 a wider body around it. Your personal rip of the Urashima 3LP box already carried the physical ritual of object-to-file conversion. This 5CD box shows the larger cassette-world context that made such a reissue necessary in the first place. Pariah Tapes was not merely a label name. It was Mikawa building a container for his own extremity before the larger noise infrastructure had fully caught up with it.

The early Incapacitants material has a different kind of electricity than the later, fully developed duo recordings. Later Incapacitants often sound like two people generating impossible weather together: feedback, vocals, electronics, chaos, comic velocity, and total pressure somehow acting as a single living system. The Pariah-era material feels more like the initial laboratory catching fire. The language is already there, but it is still mutating in public. The violence of the sound has the awkward thrill of discovery. It does not yet know all the ways it will become itself.

This is why the box should not be heard only as “early harsh noise.” It is also documentation of a method. Artist-run cassette culture allowed music to exist before permission, before polish, before broad audience, before stable genre language. A tape could be copied, mailed, traded, ignored, mythologized, lost, found, and eventually reissued decades later as a box set. Noise did not merely use cassette culture. It was shaped by it. The hiss, scarcity, handwork, fragile circulation, and private intensity all became part of the aesthetic.

Incapacitants have always made the fantasy of “pure noise” feel strangely human. Their sound may reject conventional musical intention, but it does not feel empty or mechanical. It feels overfull: screaming circuits, overloaded gestures, pressure behaving almost like laughter, a total refusal of tasteful proportion. Even in early form, the music is not simply abrasive. It is alive with bad decisions made brilliantly. It keeps moving because stopping would imply that the damage had a border.

The title Pariah Tapes also carries a social meaning. “Pariah” suggests the outcast, the refused one, the thing pushed outside the acceptable circle. That suits both the sound and the method. These tapes were not trying to enter polite music culture through a side door. They were building another room entirely, one where failure, overload, anti-technique, and extremity could become central values rather than flaws.

As a 2006 reissue, the box performs a second act of meaning. What was once marginal becomes curated. What was once cassette-scale becomes a multi-disc historical monument. Freak Animal’s edition does not tame the material, but it changes the listener’s posture toward it. The box says: this mattered. These old eruptions are not disposable. They are part of the hidden engineering of noise music.

Inside Private Release, that feels especially right. The blog keeps proving that the life of a recording is not limited to its first format. A cassette becomes rumor. A rumor becomes a box set. A box set becomes a rip. A rip becomes a post. A post becomes someone’s first encounter. The object changes clothing, but the voltage keeps jumping bodies.

Pariah Tapes is not Incapacitants becoming civilized by archival treatment. It is the archive admitting that the uncivilized material was historically necessary. The box does not explain the noise into safety. It lets the old machinery run again, louder than memory and still refusing to behave.

Incapacitants - 2020 - ST

 

Urashima – UMA 143  269.76MB FLAC

A self-titled Incapacitants record released in 2020 sounds, at first, like a fresh statement from a long-running project. Instead, it turns out to be something stranger and more valuable: the project’s first cassette, recorded by Toshiji Mikawa in 1981, left unreleased for decades, and finally pressed to vinyl by Urashima in a limited edition of 299 copies. The plain title becomes almost ceremonial. No subtitle, no joke, no office-disaster language, no mythic noise slogan. Just Incapacitants. The name before the legend had fully formed.

That makes this release feel less like another item in the discography and more like the moment someone found the first footprint in old concrete. By 2020, Incapacitants were already one of the defining names in Japanese noise: Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai as the great ecstatic duo, decades of overload, absurdity, stamina, feedback, vocals, electronics, and total-pressure performance. But this recording belongs to the moment before that duo identity, when Incapacitants was still Mikawa’s solo project in Osaka, emerging from the same early-1980s Japanese noise ecosystem that also held Hijokaidan, Merzbow, C.C.C.C., Hanatarash, Solmania, Masonna, and other figures who would later become almost mythological to listeners digging backward. Incapacitants began in 1981 as Mikawa’s solo project, with Kosakai joining after Mikawa moved to Tokyo.

Urashima’s notes frame this as one of the most sought-after artifacts from the 1980s Japanese noise scene: two long pieces, “Fulfilled Promise” and “Plague,” both newly remastered by Andrea Marutti for vinyl. “Fulfilled Promise” runs almost twenty-three minutes, beginning slowly and gradually becoming volcanic; “Plague” runs just under twenty-three minutes as well, gathering smaller early noise gestures into the shape of a second side. The label also includes a translated comment from Mikawa, who admits that hearing such artless early performances and recordings can be embarrassing, but hopes listeners will find interest in the very first recordings under the Incapacitants name. That humility is useful. It makes the record feel human without reducing its force.

The word “artless” is especially beautiful here, because Incapacitants would later become one of the most committed arguments against polite musical artfulness. Their stated aim has often been summarized as producing “pure” noise, not guided by conventional musical ideas or even ordinary human intention, using feedback, vocals, and electronics. That sounds impossible, of course. Humans are always inside the machine. But Incapacitants make the impossibility productive. They chase a sound that behaves as though it has escaped taste.

On this 1981 material, the chase is still raw. That is the value. The later Incapacitants duo can sound like a weather system that has learned how to remain in permanent catastrophe. This early solo material feels more like the weather being summoned for the first time, awkwardly, fiercely, with no guarantee that the ritual will work. It is not polished. It is not trying to be definitive. It is trying to happen.

That difference matters in the artist run. Pariah Tapes showed the broader early cassette foundation. Project Pallo ’85 gave the reissue-object a physical afterlife through your personal rip. Unauthorized Fatal Operation 990130 showed the late-1990s duo already in full absurd administrative detonation mode. This 2020 self-titled release reaches even further back, past the mythology, past the stable formulas, to the project’s first signal. It is not the biggest Incapacitants statement. It is the seed with the explosion folded inside.

There is something moving about a 1981 cassette finally arriving as a 2020 LP. The recording crosses almost four decades of underground change: cassette trading, mail-order lists, Japanese noise’s international canonization, Discogs-era collector mapping, Bandcamp-era label pages, archival vinyl reissues, and eventually blog circulation. The sound survives because each era invents a new container for it. First tape, then rumor, then reissue, then rip, then post, then another listener.

As a Private Release object, this one carries a lovely paradox. A self-titled album usually announces identity. Here, it recovers identity from before the identity became famous. The plainness of the title lets the archive say something simple and deep: before Incapacitants were “Incapacitants,” they were already becoming Incapacitants.

The noise does not arrive fully civilized by history. It arrives with dust still on its first teeth.

Incapacitants - 2023 - Oxen Man's Uneasiness

 

Oxen – OXEN080  541.46MB FLAC

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.

Incapacitants - 2025 - Burning Polar Star

 

Hello From The Gutter – HFTG-153  155.66MB FLAC

Burning Polar Star is a beautiful contradiction before it is even heard. A polar star should be fixed, cold, navigational, remote. Burning turns it unstable. The title gives us guidance and combustion in the same image: the thing sailors once used to orient themselves is now on fire. That is exactly the kind of absurd cosmic engineering Incapacitants deserve. Their noise has always had a way of making stability feel ridiculous.

Released in 2025 by Hello From The Gutter as an 8cm CD, Burning Polar Star contains a single 18-minute track by the duo of T. Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai. CDJapan and the Hello From The Gutter shop both list it as a one-track short-CD-format release, with the jacket design credited to Oosama of Texaco Leatherman on the label’s own shop page. The format matters here. After all the massive historical containers in the Incapacitants run, 5CD boxes, 3LP reissues, deep cassette recoveries, this one arrives as a tiny disc with a concentrated blast radius.

That smallness is funny because Incapacitants do not make small sound. They make overload as event, comedy, disaster, weather, and bodily argument. An 8cm CD feels almost too delicate a vehicle for them, like sending a typhoon by postcard. But that tension is part of the charm. Noise culture has always loved unsuitable containers: cassettes carrying impossible distortion, lathe cuts holding chaos in shallow grooves, CDrs behaving like unstable dispatches from rooms nobody can re-enter. Burning Polar Star joins that tradition by putting a modern Incapacitants transmission into a nostalgic, miniaturized format.

The single-track structure also suits the duo. Incapacitants rarely need elaborate architecture to justify themselves. The work is the event. Feedback, electronics, vocal eruptions, pressure surges, absurd stamina, and internal movement become enough. The listener is not asked to follow a song sequence. The listener is dropped into a field of force and left to notice how alive that field is. This is the mistake people sometimes make with harsh noise: they hear density and assume sameness. Incapacitants prove the opposite. Their density moves. It buckles, laughs, foams, collapses, restarts, and refuses the dignity of a straight line.

In the context of this artist run, Burning Polar Star is especially satisfying because it is not archival in the same way as Pariah Tapes or the 1981 self-titled material. It is not another recovered root. It is a current signal. That matters. The earlier releases show where Incapacitants came from, but this one says the engine is still generating heat. The old mythology is not merely being repackaged for collectors. Mikawa and Kosakai are still producing new noise in the present tense.

The title also invites a wider image. A polar star is an orientation point. It does not move much from the viewer’s perspective, so it becomes a reference for travel, navigation, and return. Incapacitants are a kind of polar star in Japanese noise: not because they are calm, but because they remain fixed in their commitment. Around them, formats change, labels change, listeners change, markets change, blogs appear, blogs disappear, and old tapes become expensive artifacts. Yet the basic proposition remains: noise as pure energy, anti-musical intention, ecstatic overload, ridiculous seriousness.

But here the star is burning. That means the guide is not safe. It cannot be treated as a museum object or a stable monument. It is still hot enough to hurt the hand. That is the point of a 2025 Incapacitants release. The past is there, but it is not frozen.

As a Private Release post, this one completes a lovely arc. Your Incapacitants sequence can hold the whole contradiction: the collector’s history, the physical rip, the reissue economy, the office-joke titles, the early cassette mythology, and now a new short-form release that feels almost like a flare from the same old impossible machine. The archive is not only backward-looking. It can catch fresh sparks too.

Burning Polar Star may be only eighteen minutes, but eighteen minutes of Incapacitants is not a miniature. It is a compressed weather emergency. A tiny disc, a burning guide-star, two lifers at the controls, and the old beautiful problem still unresolved: how can sound this excessive remain so alive?

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.

JK Flesh - 2012 - Posthuman

 

3BY3 – 3BY3009  386.19MB FLAC

Posthuman is Justin Broadrick returning to heaviness by another route. Not a Godflesh album exactly, not Jesu’s vast grey radiance, not Techno Animal’s broken-system dub pressure, but a solo statement where all those histories seem to pass through one damaged processor and come out stripped, grimy, and beat-driven.

Released in 2012 on 3BY3, Posthuman was the first proper JK Flesh album, though the name had appeared earlier in Broadrick’s orbit through Techno Animal and related work. The project’s own later description frames JK Flesh as Broadrick’s heavy/mutant techno and electronica identity, informed by industrial, dub, power electronics, extreme electronic music, beats, and bass. That is the useful key. This is not electronic music as escape from metal. It is electronic music as metal’s afterimage: rhythm, weight, repetition, distortion, and pressure rebuilt without needing the old band-room grammar.

The album arrives at an interesting point in Broadrick’s arc. Godflesh had returned to live activity around 2010, while Jesu and Pale Sketcher had explored more melodic, mournful, and diffuse territory. Posthuman feels like a counterweight to that softness, or maybe a necessary correction of pressure. Drowned in Sound called it a “direct reaction against the purity of the Jesu sound,” describing it as grimy, dirty, and beat-driven, with more in common with the revived Godflesh than much of Broadrick’s recent work. That gets close, but the record is not merely Godflesh translated into electronics. It is Broadrick letting the beat become the oppressor.

The opening “Knuckledragger” sets the terms perfectly. The title suggests regression, brute motion, the body before enlightenment. The music turns that idea into a slow industrial trudge: detuned heaviness, synthetic percussion, damaged vocal presence, a groove that does not dance so much as haul itself across metal flooring. From there, the album begins to reveal its real trick. It is heavy, but the heaviness is not only guitar weight. It is sub-bass, loop logic, percussion programming, repetition, compression, and the sensation that every sound has been forced through an exhausted infrastructure.

That is where Posthuman earns its title. “Posthuman” here does not sound like sleek futurism, chrome bodies, or utopian transcendence. It sounds like the human after work, after industry, after digital mediation, after collapse into systems that continue operating without mercy. The record’s beats do not liberate the body. They discipline it. The bass does not open space. It colonizes the room.

Pitchfork heard the album as a cratered terrain of heavy basses, guitars, electronics, and nervous percussion, somewhere between Broadrick’s metal lineage and contemporary post-dubstep pressure. The middle of the album, especially “Devoured,” “Earthmover,” and the title track, is where that hybrid becomes most alive: half-step lurch, industrial bass movement, charred electronics, and a sense of club music dragged into a factory where the lights have been replaced by warning signals.

What makes Broadrick’s work endure is that he has never treated heaviness as one fixed substance. In Napalm Death, speed and extremity were one answer. In Godflesh, repetition and machine rhythm became another. In Jesu, weight dissolved into melancholy light. In Techno Animal, with Kevin Martin, dub, hip-hop, industrial, and electronics became a contaminated urban pressure field. JK Flesh gathers those routes and narrows them into a solo machine. The result is solitary music, but not small music. It sounds like one person operating an entire punishment grid.

Posthuman also lands beautifully in the archive after Incapacitants because it shows a different philosophy of extremity. Incapacitants are overflow, ecstatic saturation, noise as impossible weather. JK Flesh is control under stress. The overload is present, but organized around pulse. The listener is not thrown into a storm so much as locked into a sequence of impacts. One is the ocean breaking through the walls. The other is a hydraulic press remembering rhythm.

There is also something historically sharp about hearing this in the early-2010s moment. Dubstep and post-dubstep had already become visible enough to be absorbed, debated, commercialized, and mutated. Broadrick does not approach those rhythms as fashion. He drags them back toward industrial dread. The wobble, swing, and bass pressure become less nightclub excitement than urban anxiety. This is dance music after the dance floor has been militarized by exhaustion.

As a Private Release post, Posthuman feels like a hinge between older industrial heaviness and newer digital pressure. It does not belong to cassette archaeology or reissue devotion. It belongs to the era where underground listeners were already navigating files, blogs, genre collapse, and the strange afterlife of every earlier sound becoming instantly adjacent. Godflesh, dub, grime, metal, noise, techno, power electronics, and post-dubstep no longer have to stand in separate rooms. Broadrick lets them share one badly ventilated chamber.

The album’s value is not that it makes the human disappear. It proves the opposite. The human remains, but under compression: voice distorted, body sequenced, anger looped, grief mechanized, groove made hostile. Posthuman is not the future as upgrade. It is the future as damage report.

The machine is not replacing the body here. It is showing what the body has already become.

JK Flesh - 2016 - Rise Above

 

Electric Deluxe – EDLX.048  285.68MB FLAC

Rise Above is a title that could almost sound inspirational until JK Flesh gets hold of it. In Justin Broadrick’s hands, rising above does not mean transcendence, peace, or escape. It sounds more like pressure building upward from below: concrete, bass, smoke, repetition, a body trying to climb out of machinery while the machinery keeps learning its shape.

Released in 2016 on Speedy J’s Electric Deluxe label, Rise Above was JK Flesh’s second full-length album and one of the clearest statements of the project’s purpose. Broadrick’s own JK Flesh description frames the alias as heavy/mutant techno and electronica informed by industrial, dub, power electronics, beats, and bass. That definition matters here because Rise Above largely removes the old guitar armor and leaves the rhythmic skeleton exposed. The heaviness remains, but it is no longer dependent on riffs. It comes from sub-bass, distortion, repetition, compression, and a brutally physical 4/4 pulse.

That shift made the album divisive in the right way. Anyone approaching JK Flesh only as a Godflesh satellite could miss what Broadrick was doing. The old Godflesh logic is still present: machine rhythm, urban dread, body-meets-system punishment, the slow collapse of human warmth under industrial pressure. But on Rise Above, those ideas are rebuilt through techno. The beat is not decoration. The beat is the institution.

Resident Advisor described the record as wild, forceful, and meticulous, emphasizing its huge beats, static, and the tension between animal intensity and mechanical determination. That is the album’s whole engine: the human and the programmed locked together, neither winning, both damaged by the contact.

Compared with Posthuman, this album feels more narrowed and more confident. Posthuman still had the thrill of collision: industrial metal residue meeting post-dubstep weight, Godflesh memory leaking into new machinery. Rise Above sounds like Broadrick has stopped explaining the hybrid and simply started operating it. Tracks such as “Tunnel,” “Defector,” and “Swarm” move with sparse repetitive beats, heavy bass, and murky distortion, a sound Igloo compared to Andy Stott’s slowed, crushed, industrialized club language. But Broadrick’s version has a different emotional gravity. It is less narcotic, more punished. Less foggy room, more service corridor with the air system failing.

The album’s title also works against itself in a useful way. “Rise above” is usually motivational language, the slogan of self-help posters and corporate resilience speeches. JK Flesh makes it sound exhausted, almost sarcastic. To rise above this music would require leaving the body behind, but the body is exactly where the record keeps returning: pulse, impact, fatigue, muscle memory, breath under stress. This is posthuman not because the human has disappeared, but because the human is now processed through rhythm, infrastructure, and overload.

There is also a Birmingham shadow here, even when the guitars recede. Broadrick’s lifelong language of heaviness has always felt connected to industrial geography: factories, estates, concrete, machines, pressure systems, the spiritual weather of post-industrial Britain. Rise Above translates that geography into club terms. The dance floor becomes a worksite. The kick drum becomes a stamping press. The bass becomes architecture. The result is dance music with no fantasy of release. Movement exists, but it does not necessarily free anyone.

That is why the record feels important inside the Private Release sequence. After Incapacitants, where extremity often arrives as overflowing ecstatic noise, JK Flesh gives extremity a grid. Incapacitants make the room impossible to measure. JK Flesh measures it, reinforces it, then lowers the ceiling until the beat starts touching your skull. Both are forms of pressure, but the philosophies differ. One is storm. One is system.

The Electric Deluxe context is useful too. Releasing Rise Above through a techno label rather than a metal or industrial imprint forces the album into another conversation. It asks whether Broadrick’s heaviness can function not as rock heaviness adapted to electronics, but as techno heaviness on its own terms. The answer is yes, though it is an ugly yes. This is not sleek futurism. It is functional punishment. A club tool for rooms with bad memories.

Rise Above does not rise by becoming lighter. It rises like smoke from overheated wiring, like pressure through a shaft, like a buried machine finding the floor above it. The album’s achievement is that it makes minimal techno feel physically ruined without stripping it of motion. It is bleak, but not inert. Heavy, but not nostalgic. Mechanical, but still full of human damage.

Broadrick has spent a lifetime proving that heaviness is not a genre. It is a condition. Rise Above is one of the clearest demonstrations: the guitar can vanish, the band can vanish, the metal frame can vanish, and the weight remains.

JK Flesh - 2019 - In Your Pit EP

 

Pressure  – none  132.37MB FLAC

In Your Pit is a perfect JK Flesh title because it reverses the usual fantasy of club music. The pit is not a place of release here. It is not the ecstatic center of the room where bodies dissolve into rhythm. It is lower, dirtier, more trapped: a hole, a wound, a pressure chamber, the place where the bass goes after it stops pretending to be social.

Released in 2019 on The Bug’s PRESSURE label, the EP makes the relationship between Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin explicit again. Their history runs deep through Techno Animal, God, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire, and the wider Birmingham/London industrial-dub mutation zone, so hearing JK Flesh appear on The Bug’s label feels less like a casual guest slot than a reunion of two pressure specialists. PRESSURE described the release as three slow, heavy “dread techno” tracks plus a remix by The Bug, and that phrase is not hype-speak so much as a warning label.

Compared with Rise Above, this EP feels less polished and more buried. The beats do not simply hit. They sink. “In Your Pit” moves with a slow, steely weight, driven by a modulated bassline that behaves less like a riff than a blunt instrument dragged across concrete. Resident Advisor called the release “unforgiving” and noted the title track’s slow, heavy industrial techno character, which is exactly where the EP lives: not in speed, but in compression.

The Bug remix is important because it does not just decorate the original. It drags the track into Kevin Martin’s own sound-system kingdom: dub weight, drunken swing, doom-riff pressure, and bass as weather event. The remix reminds us that Broadrick and Martin have spent decades approaching heaviness from different tunnels. Broadrick often builds heaviness as industrial architecture: rhythm, repetition, distortion, human damage mechanized. Martin often builds it as pressure system: bass, space, dread, voice, sound-system violence. On In Your Pit, those methods touch again.

“Paranoid Archetype” might be the most revealing title here. JK Flesh is full of archetypes, but they are not clean mythic figures. They are damaged modern forms: worker, machine, addict, target, body, signal, victim, aggressor, ghost in infrastructure. Paranoia is not treated as a private flaw. It becomes a condition produced by systems. The beat watches you back. The bass knows where you live.

“Rub Me Out” completes the EP’s bodily threat. The phrase can mean erasure, murder, abrasion, or crude intimacy, and JK Flesh lets all of those meanings hover. This is part of Broadrick’s long gift: making heaviness feel both physical and existential. The sound does not only bruise the body. It questions what kind of body can survive inside these rhythms.

The EP’s format helps. Four tracks, about twenty-two minutes, no wasted architecture. The Bandcamp listing gives the running order as “In Your Pit,” The Bug remix, “Paranoid Archetype,” and “Rub Me Out,” with the release dated May 24, 2019. That compactness makes it feel like a tool rather than a journey: a short device built for subwoofers, concrete rooms, headphones turned too loud, and private nervous systems that already know the city is not neutral.

Inside the Private Release sequence, this works beautifully after the larger JK Flesh albums because it narrows the lens. Posthuman introduced the beat-driven industrial body. Rise Above turned techno into a vertical pressure system. In Your Pit goes downward. It is gutter-level Broadrick, club music with no promise of pleasure except the pleasure of surviving impact.

It also links back to the archive’s broader interest in format and circulation. A 12-inch EP on PRESSURE is not just “another release.” It belongs to sound-system culture, to the physical argument of bass in a room, to the idea that heaviness is not only heard but applied. That matters for JK Flesh. Broadrick’s music has always treated sound as force, whether through grindcore speed, Godflesh repetition, Jesu’s crushed melancholy, or this slow-motion industrial dread techno.

In Your Pit does not rise above. It climbs down, bolts the hatch, and lets the bass explain the architecture.

JK Flesh - 2023 - No Exits

 

Avalanche Recordings – AREC072  288.19MB FLAC

No Exits sounds less like a title than a floor plan. No doors, no emergency lighting, no release valve, no false promise that the beat will eventually become freedom. Justin Broadrick has used JK Flesh to explore many kinds of pressure, but this 2023 EP makes the architecture unusually explicit. The system is closed. The bass is not a vehicle. It is containment.

Released on September 11, 2023 through Broadrick’s Avalanche Recordings as AREC072, No Exits is described on the JK Flesh Bandcamp page as “damaged industrial tekno, 2 step and slo mo dread techno for broken sound systems.” That phrase catches the record’s grim little brilliance. This is not techno polished into efficiency. It is techno after corrosion. The grid remains, but the wiring is wet, the concrete sweats, and the speakers sound as though they have seen things they refuse to report.

After Posthuman, Rise Above, and In Your Pit, this release feels both familiar and sharpened. Broadrick’s tools are recognizable: heavy bass, industrial percussion, dub pressure, distortion, slow-motion club structure, grey atmosphere, and a body trapped somewhere between machine command and nervous refusal. But No Exits has a particular bluntness. The track titles read like rejected urban signage from a ruined transport authority: “No Exits,” “One Way System,” “Not Your Dub,” “White Van Horror Man,” “No Man No Cry,” “My Fucking Exit,” and “No Way System.” The repetition of exits, ways, systems, and negations turns the EP into a maze built from instructions that contradict each other.

That is where the record gets interesting. JK Flesh has always carried the aftershock of Godflesh, Techno Animal, dub, power electronics, and Birmingham industrial dread, but No Exits does not need to lean on biography. It works because the beats themselves feel trapped. The rhythms move, but they do not travel. The bass hits, but it does not liberate. The tracks suggest motion inside a sealed circuit, the body dancing because there is nowhere else for the pressure to go.

“One Way System” is almost the thesis. A one-way system can be traffic engineering, social control, genre discipline, addiction, labor routine, or psychic compulsion. Broadrick’s music has long understood those overlaps. His heaviness is rarely just heaviness. It is infrastructure made emotional. The beat becomes a rule. The bass becomes a wall. Distortion becomes the sound of the rule starting to fail without ever actually breaking.

“Not Your Dub” is also a perfect JK Flesh phrase. Broadrick’s relationship to dub has never been clean reverence. It is dub stripped of sunshine, roots warmth, and spacious spiritual ease, then dragged into industrial negative space. The echo remains, but it does not open the horizon. It repeats the enclosure. Dub becomes claustrophobia. The drop becomes a drain.

The EP’s compactness helps. Seven tracks, no sprawling album architecture, no need to explain the project’s entire universe. Regen Magazine described No Exits as the more immediate and urgent counterpart to Broadrick’s 2023 PI11 release, and that feels right. This is not the slowest-burning JK Flesh material. It has a directness, even when the tempos stay heavy and grim. It behaves like a set of functional tools built for damaged rooms: short deployments of pressure, each one slightly different in angle, all of them returning to the same conclusion.

“White Van Horror Man” brings a nasty everyday Britishness into the frame. The title sounds local, threatening, almost tabloid, a scrap of working-class urban folklore turned into beat music. That kind of phrase is one of Broadrick’s strengths. His work often feels post-apocalyptic, but the apocalypse is not fantasy. It is estates, roads, vans, underpasses, service corridors, bad wiring, bored cruelty, cheap systems, hard weather. No Exits is not science fiction. It is the present with the decorative surfaces removed.

Inside the Private Release sequence, this one sits nicely after In Your Pit. That EP descended into the hole. No Exits maps the hole as a civic structure. The pit is no longer private. It has lanes, systems, signage, closures, bad jokes, and broken speakers. The individual trapped body becomes a social body. No man no cry. No way system. My fucking exit. The titles sound like someone arguing with the architecture.

There is also something refreshing about Broadrick continuing to make JK Flesh feel current without chasing trend. By 2023, the industrial-techno crossover had long since become a recognizable zone, sometimes even a style with its own clichés. Broadrick avoids feeling like a tourist because this pressure has always been part of his language. The club tools are not costumes. They are another set of machines for the same lifelong investigation: what happens when rhythm, body, despair, anger, and infrastructure become indistinguishable?

No Exits does not offer transcendence. It does not rise above, and it does not climb out of the pit. It accepts the closed system and turns the walls into percussion. That is the awful usefulness of JK Flesh at its best: it makes confinement move.

JK Flesh / Prurient - 2013 - Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination

 

Daymare Recordings – DYMC-179  233.59MB FLAC

Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination is a title that sounds both devotional and violent, which makes it exactly right for a JK Flesh / Prurient split. Worship can mean surrender, reverence, discipline, repetition, humiliation, ecstasy, or loss of self. Cleansing can mean purification, erasure, punishment, or preparation. The imagination is not being decorated here. It is being scoured.

Released by Hydra Head in late 2012, with the vinyl commonly circulating as a 2013 object, the record carries extra historical weight because it became the label’s final release of new material during its original full-time run. That fact changes the temperature. Hydra Head was never simply a metal label. At its best, it functioned as a meeting ground for heaviness in multiple forms: post-hardcore, sludge, drone, math-rock, noise, industrial, avant-metal, and whatever else refused a neat room. A JK Flesh / Prurient split is not an odd ending. It is almost too fitting. Two artists who understand heaviness as condition rather than genre close the door by refusing closure.

The structure is beautifully simple. JK Flesh takes the first side with “Fear Of Fear,” “Deceiver,” and “Obedient Automaton.” Prurient takes the second with “Chosen Books,” “Entering The Water,” and “I Understand You.” Six tracks, two artists, roughly two halves of the same damaged sermon. On paper it looks balanced. In practice, the contrast is the point. Broadrick brings machinery, impact, and industrial beat architecture. Fernow brings psychological exposure, noise-field collapse, and the sick glow of confession without comfort.

The JK Flesh side feels like Broadrick continuing the work opened on Posthuman, but sharpened into shorter forms. “Fear Of Fear” is an almost perfect phrase for his music because fear becomes self-replicating. Not fear of a thing, but fear as a system, fear eating its own reflection. The sound has that familiar JK Flesh grammar: heavy electronic drums, bass pressure, damaged textures, industrial swing, and a body being marched through circuitry. Pitchfork heard Broadrick’s three tracks as concussive, with huge electronic drums and power-electronics abrasion, and that description fits the physical sensation of the side.

“Deceiver” is the Broadrick hinge. It feels connected to Godflesh without simply imitating it, a slow industrial dirge pushed through electronic mutation. The title opens a theological and psychological door at once: the deceiver as devil, system, addiction, self, machine, memory. Broadrick’s career has always had that undercurrent, the sense that rhythm can be an oppressive truth-telling device. A beat does not lie because it does not need to persuade. It just returns.

“Obedient Automaton” may be the most JK Flesh title possible. The human as programmed labor. The body as compliant machine. The worker, the listener, the user, the citizen, the addict, the believer: all moving because the system has already written the gesture. Broadrick’s heaviness has always been strongest when it makes repetition feel social rather than merely musical. This is not just a loop. It is instruction.

Then Prurient enters and the pressure changes shape. Dominick Fernow’s work often treats noise as emotional exposure rather than just sonic extremity. His best material understands that harshness can be intimate, even embarrassingly intimate, because the scream and the static are not opposites. They are two ways of failing to remain composed. On this split, Prurient does not simply answer JK Flesh by becoming louder. He changes the problem from machinery to psychic weather.

“Chosen Books” is a great title because it brings scripture, selection, secrecy, and obsession into the room. Books are chosen by whom? For what ritual? For what argument with the self? The Prurient side has less of Broadrick’s beat-driven architecture, but it is not shapeless. It builds through layers, loops, high-pressure tones, and emotional drift. Pitchfork described Fernow’s approach here as using loops and layers until the sound either falls apart or collapses inward, which is close to the feeling: Prurient does not build a factory. He builds a crisis inside language.

The closing track, “I Understand You,” gives the whole record its bruised grace. That title is almost unbearably direct after so much pressure: not “I defeat you,” not “I worship you,” not “I cleanse you,” but “I understand you.” Understanding becomes the final danger. It can be mercy, possession, manipulation, recognition, or the saddest form of intimacy. Contemporary reviewers singled it out as one of the most strangely beautiful moments in Prurient’s and Hydra Head’s orbit, and it makes sense as the record’s last breath. The noise does not vanish into peace. It briefly lets tenderness appear inside corrosion.

That is why this split works better than a simple collaboration might have. JK Flesh and Prurient do not need to merge into one style. They stand on opposite sides of heaviness and let Hydra Head’s closing frame hold them together. Broadrick’s side is the body under system pressure. Fernow’s side is the psyche under devotional pressure. One turns obedience into rhythm. The other turns confession into static.

Inside the Private Release sequence, this is a strong placement after the JK Flesh solo run because it opens a side passage into another major underground language. JK Flesh alone can become architecture, pressure, concrete, beat, sealed room. Prurient introduces a more unstable human voltage: shame, longing, worship, meltdown, romantic sickness, spiritual abrasion. The record’s title suddenly feels like a shared equation. Worship cleanses the imagination because worship destroys ordinary imaginative freedom. It replaces fantasy with fixation. It gives the mind an altar and demands repetition.

The Hydra Head ending also matters to the archive. Labels are not just companies. They are taste machines, friendship maps, argument structures, and distribution rituals. When a label ends, its final release becomes a statement whether anyone wanted that burden or not. Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination carries that burden well because it refuses sentimentality. It does not say goodbye with a victory lap. It says goodbye by asking what heaviness can still mean after genre boundaries have stopped being useful.

As a blog post, this one feels like a node where several histories cross: Broadrick’s long industrial-metal-dub lineage, Fernow’s noise/power-electronics/emotional-exposure world, Hydra Head’s adventurous heavy-music catalog, and the post-2010 moment when underground heaviness was no longer tied to one instrument set. Guitar, drum machine, feedback, vocal, keyboard, bass pressure, loop, scream, label history, all of it can carry weight.

Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination is not a farewell in the soft sense. It is a closing door with sound still leaking around the frame. The imagination is cleansed, maybe, but not healed. More like stripped to the nerve, rinsed in distortion, and left awake under the altar light.

Kakerlak / Terg / Taskmaster - 2006 - The Blood of the Forest Turns the Streams Dark Red

 

Militant Walls – #05  445.55MB FLAC

The Blood Of The Forest Turns The Streams Dark Red is one of those titles that sounds both overblown and weirdly exact. It has pulp-horror grandeur, ecological dread, and backyard ritual all at once. Blood, forest, streams, darkness, redness: the whole phrase turns landscape into wound. Nature is not peaceful here. It is staining the water.

Released in 2006, the split brings together Kakerlak, Terg, and Taskmaster, three names that feel right at home in the mid-2000s noise underground, where CDRs and small labels allowed strange local intensities to exist without needing the permission of larger scenes. Discogs lists the release with Kakerlak’s “Relentless Dust” as the opening track, which already sounds like a perfect entry point: not clean destruction, but matter ground down until it becomes weather.

What is interesting about a three-way split like this is that it does not behave like a grand artist statement. It is closer to a field report. Three projects enter the same frame, each contributing a form of abrasion, pressure, decay, or hostility. The result is less an album than a shared clearing where different kinds of noise can leave marks on the same ground.

Kakerlak’s name has the right insect-life implication: roachlike survival, contamination, skitter, endurance under bad conditions. In noise terms, that suggests material that thrives in collapse rather than mourning it. “Relentless Dust” is a useful phrase because dust is what remains after things have been used, broken, burned, neglected, or forgotten. Relentless dust is not passive. It keeps arriving. It covers evidence. It enters lungs. It turns time into texture.

Terg and Taskmaster add different pressures. Even without overloading the review with fake certainty, their presence on a split like this suggests the pleasure of adjacent extremities. One project may scrape where another floods. One may lean into electronics, another into junk, contact-mic violence, feedback, vocal damage, or tape-filth pacing. The point is not that all three become one voice. The point is that the release allows them to share a contaminated environment.

The title’s forest imagery also gives the record a different emotional color from the industrial and urban material we have been moving through. This is not JK Flesh’s concrete pressure or Incapacitants’ ecstatic signal storm. It feels more feral, more rural, more rot-based. The forest here is not folk-romantic. It is where things are buried, decomposed, hunted, hidden, and eventually washed into the stream. The blood turning water dark red gives the release a little mythic horror without needing any formal mythology. Something has happened offscreen, and the sound is what the landscape does afterward.

That makes it especially useful inside the archive after Incapacitants. Incapacitants can make noise feel like pure electrical event, almost cosmic in its absurd human extremity. This split brings noise back toward smaller terrain: labels, friends, mail-order objects, limited runs, underground adjacency, the modest terror of handmade circulation. It is not trying to be the final word on anything. It is part of the ecosystem.

There is a kind of beauty in that. Noise history is not only built from the famous monuments: Merzbow, Incapacitants, Whitehouse, Hijokaidan, Prurient, Wolf Eyes, and the rest of the visible peaks. It is also built from thousands of releases like this, where three names share a disc or tape and make a temporary weather system that exists because someone cared enough to assemble it. These objects are the roots and fungi of the underground. Not always visible from above, but essential to the forest’s hidden communication.

As a Private Release post, The Blood Of The Forest Turns The Streams Dark Red feels like one of those entries that justifies the archive’s openness. Not everything needs to be canonical. Not everything needs to be a masterpiece. Some uploads are valuable because they preserve the ecology around the masterpieces: the side paths, the lesser-known projects, the little blood trails that show where the scene was actually moving.

The record’s title says the blood enters the streams. That is the archive, too. Individual sounds flow into larger circulation, staining whatever comes next.