K.K. NULL

Atomic disorder

CD, Neurot / Conspiracy

Let’s make this one clear: solo-records by Kazayuki K. Null are always a dangerous thing for the listener. Either the are great forays into sonic disturbances that lighten up the mind as if it was soaked in gasoline, like the legendary “Terminal Beach” album or “Ultimate Material II”, two records which made me buy almost everything with the name KK Null on it for some years. Which then could be big disappointments, because some of those records / recordings were more than boring in more than one way. Null doodling off into eternal voids of senseless mindnumbing noise-fusion, just him and his crazy Nullsonic-tool and no recipe for the drugs to make the record bearable. And since I don’t want to take drugs to like music anyway, I was quite glad that KK Null seemed to have stepped back from the musical front a little. Or I stepped back from being interested in KK Null for some time, might also be true. I don’t think that guy ever took back his energy and effort in releasing music. My satisfaction and joy is really big to now be able to say that, after some hesitation at first, “Atomic Disorder” is a great one. Diverse, intricate and impressive walls of sound, dynamic and full of variation.

Zeni Geva, the “hardrock”-band of KK Null, together with his two fellow-fighter Tabata and Eito were one of the bands that made me start a fanzine back in 1995 (!). The zine was all about Noise-rock, Japan Noise and bands no one had ever heard of. Very much like the records reviewed on this website except that most of them are in some way electronic music. Anyway, some of those bands and artists from back then are still around. (The other imminent band to make us start was, by the way, Shellac, if you really wanted to know.) The list of names Null has worked with is impressive and features every household name of noise-activists of all genres. From Merzbow to John Rose, from Masonna to Jim O’Rourke, from Steve Albini to Keji Haino, from John Zorn to Fred Frith and ever so on and on. I don’t think that there is an accurate discography available on the net, due to the number of self-released tapes and records starting somewhere in the Eighties, which means we are talking a career of over 20 years of noise-music. Of course, the guy had to walk some sideways and back during those years. I just wanted to give you a description of where this guy has been, before you stumbled over him.

“Atomic Disorder” is a clever package of dissonant noises, synth-sounds, soundscapes and noise-drones, that are brutally hacked onto one another. Not made to please, but rather to disturb the listener out of his prejudices and expectations about music, Null pairs deeply Eighties keyboard-runs, which are actually computer generated modulations of original sounds, with digital noises and then some hissing sounds that sound like analogue sound generators from the last century. Or percussive noises hitting in stereo-effects mixed with waves of flirring and hissing pleeps and beeps over a steadily growing wall of high-levelled multi-frequencies. There are also a lot of industrial sounds paired with a processor screaming in agony, though the references to emotions and political systems always strike me as a little displaced in connection with Null. I can understand the theoretical underpinnings of old European noise-outfits, from Throbbing Gristle onwards, who have never felt any reluctance to make up big ideologies and publicised them (which is not judging their worth or correctness in any way).

Null, like most of his Japanese contemporaries, never talked a lot about politics or the relationships between human, machine and society – a field of ideas that comes fast and easy with this kind of music. It always seemed to me as if he was driven by his own, very Asian philosophy that made him view the world in completely different terms, and that his constant and enduring work with sounds and noises was more of an obsessive hobby that has become profession than an act of artistic expression. In some things, the Japanese are way more forward than us Europeans. I mean, they cut their fingers off to say they are sorry, they strap their women to the ceiling or to beams of their houses in acrobatic ways, they drive 90 minutes to work in crowded subway trains and so on, and if you ask them why, they’ll just say, because that is the way it is. On the other hand, the aural art of Null is so displaced and out of this earth that there is nothing especially Japanese left in his music, except for the will to take whatever comes to the extreme. And if this argument ends in exactly the place it has started in, then that might even be the desired – or not-desired – effect.