"The most radical act of any art is the refusal to aestheticize. Incapacitants have held that refusal for over four decades, and Extreme Gospel Nights - a cassette recorded live at Gospel in Tokyo in 1993 and released on Vanilla Records the same year - remains one of the most uncompromising statements of that position.

Toshiji Mikawa formed Incapacitants in Osaka in 1981 as a solo project, initially active alongside Yamatsuka Eye and others, emerging from the same ferment that had produced Hijokaidan. After relocating to Tokyo, Mikawa was joined by Fumio Kosakai - himself an occasional Hijokaidan member and former member of C.C.C.C. - and the duo has functioned since as a kind of pure noise dialectic: two salaried workers (a bank deputy general manager and a government office worker, respectively) who transform themselves at the electronics table into something altogether inhuman. Their stated aim is noise uninfluenced by musical ideas or human intention - what Kosakai calls "hard noise", a nod toward hard bop that is more than ironic: there is, for those who listen closely, something unmistakably jazz-like in the interplay between Mikawa and Kosakai's feedback and electronics, a quality that recalls the climactic intensities of Pharoah Sanders or Albert Ayler.

Extreme Gospel Nights documents this intensity in its most unmediated form - two tracks, Bitter Insect and Accelerated No(i)sebleed, recorded live with the energy of vivisected circuitry, dense and agonizing and full of detail. Very little air to breathe. Precisely the point."

Vanilla Records, 1993