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Renowned noise musician KK Null continues his ongoing collaboration with experimental/soundscape guitarist Joel Gilardini, the series "Psychic Drones", which began in 2020 with the 1st volume.  The 3rd volume is being released now in 2024.  With eleven tracks at sixty-five minutes in total, there's a lot of material here, and moving at a more rapid pace than is typical in the world of dark ambient.

It is a great, big, menacing alien sound that descends from the sky; psychedelic noise at its finest, an immersive and inviting warm resonance, throbbing with rhythmic delays.  There are squalls of harsh high-frequency synth I know to be signature KK Null,while Gilardini contributes what sounds to my ears like a performance for guitar & FX pedals, distortion heavily filtered and phased to create a wash of rough-hewn ambience.  In general, the sound of the production here is reverberant, dirty and distant, as if the whole album is a live recording.

Parts of the album are more serene, minimal and ambient than what I am used from KK Null, sounding a lot like Oophoi or Mathias Grassow in the 2nd piece "Loosen Beliefs", a pure-sounding, smoothly gliding drone.  This is continuously integrated back into noisier environments, of course, rising to a noisy crescendo at the end of the track and then segueing into the bleak "Disjointed Cores", a heavily degraded rhythmic noise loop that has endured severe processing, with a distinctly industrial, dystopian tone.

In addition to the ever modulating drones and swells, there are what the liner notes call 'algorithmic drums': rhythmic sequences made out of clicks, pops and other analog synth noise.  I have achieved similar results in my Eurorack system, though knowing KK Null, the equipment used is likely custom made.  The addition of such elements make the album as a whole more engaging and active feeling, bringing it closer to the territory of artists like Pan Sonic, who skirt the boundaries between dubby, minimal IDM/downtempo and pure dark ambient soundscape.

The tones here are truly deep and massive.  Many times I found myself wondering at the complex harmonics in the shifting, obliterated drones. There seem to be cinematic melodic progressions buried beneath the ash and dust.

This is one of my favourite works of noisy ambience as of this point in time, and one of my favourite works in the KK Null catalogue (a high compliment considering how much good music he has).  Joel's gritty pedal explorations make a perfect compliment to Null's experimental synthesis, transmuting it into something deeper, and more varied and colorful.  I will certainly have to listen to the first two in the series.