KK Null has worked with basically the spectrum of experimental noise/ dark ambient musicians since his musical beginnings in the early 1980s. When you look you see a list that includes Merzbow, Mick Harris Jim O’Rourke, Zíev Matmos, and on and on. A lot of names pop up that I am marginally familiar with and others I don’t have a clue about, but all that is irrelevant to the point I am making – that Null is a powerhouse in his own right when it comes to creating noisy dark ambient. And having released over a hundred albums is pretty prolific at that.
This record is no exception to this discography. It begins right off the bat with a noisy blast to the face, that just sort of smacks you upside the jaw and keeps right on pummelling. All the while it seems to be building to some non existent peak. To be honest it has a little more dance synth in it than I was expecting. I was expecting more of just a sonic blast of noise that lasted through out the album. But there is a great techno bassline underneath the songs. I really didn’t expect that, and that is not to say they are noisy dance songs; powernoise this ain’t. But that there is that repetitive structure holding everything together I hadn’t expected. I mean not that I hadn’t expected structure, just not that sort of structure. I had thought it would be more ambient drone than noisy groove.
It’s pretty neat how they begin and end in noisy chaos too. Like it builds to a structure in the middle, but the beginning and bending of each track are just pure madness. A total explosion at the end of each track which is pretty fascinating. After about the third track though it does get a little difficult to listen to as it is just so chaotically noisy. Some of the high pitched static starts to wear on your ears and little and drive you a little built mad. But really I’m impressed with the overall smoothness of the sound. There’s a general level of jaggedness you expect form a noise release but this actually flows really smoothly and gets a little intense at times, but the overall transition is very smooth indeed, which makes for quite a different listen than many other noise artists and I think really makes Oxygen Flash stand out as an experimental release it totally avoids that pitfall of sameness that this music can fall into and instead creates it’s own unique sonic structure that makes for an interesting and different musical experience.
That said it doesn’t really serve to take you on a space age voyage, but it does get you into an external headspace where you just groove along with everything. So noisy and harsh check, but with a little something extra.
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