KK Null — Fertile

Fertile finds Japanese  audio explorer KK Null tightening up and reign-in his often sprawling sci-fi sound worlds into more atmospheric, shorter and more earth based collection of tracks. That  also highlight the more straight forward cinematic tendencies  of his work.

Maybe it’s has to do with his use of field recordings from the northern territory in Australia that gives the material a more striped down, eerier and earthy feel?. That said you’d be hard pressed to make out any open and untouched field recordings here. Sure there harmonic traces are still present but KK Null has put them through all manner of filter and laptop trickery to give them his own audio sound print.

I think it has to do with him cutting the tracks shorter and focusing more on stripped down and often repetitive textures, under tied by eerier/dark cinematic tones. He also Concentrates on creating an atmosphere instead of blow the listener mind with audio gymnastics.  Most of tracks here don’t run much above the five minute mark, which he fills with pounding almost gone wrong aboriginal rhythms/ beats, bush fire noise hazes, and chugging decaying corrugated shack almost metallic elements. It feels like one has ingested some very strange drugs and then been drop out in the middle of night in Australia outback and swamp lands. Left to make sense of your surroundings and often  hostile environment, as you travel through the remains of freezing night into the scorching day.

Don’t get me wrong this is anything close to simplistic or any less daunting for the uninitiated. It’s jarring, mind altering and often frightening as ever. It just takes his sound art into a more sun-stroked, swamp-sick and eerier cinematic angle.