KK Null – Peak of Nothingness

December 2000 • Hushush

KK Null is one of those names in underground music that I seem to have heard quite a bit before I actually heard anything by him, despite the fact that he has (reportedly) released over a hundred albums. With that kind of prolificacy, it's difficult to keep quality control (something I've written about before) and albums by such artists are always a crapshoot. Unfortunately, with the album I chose, things didn't turn out so well.

Despite his reputation for particularly loud music (see his band Zeni Geva in particular, they are pretty good), Peak of Nothingness is a very quiet album. It has an incredibly sparse sound, somewhere on the border of noise and musique concrète, with each track consisting of just one or two sounds at a time—soft pulses, whining drones, mechanical swellings, glitches, things of that nature. To me it's a very alienating experience, kind of like listening to those sound effect CDs that are just random, unconnected, meaningless sounds one after the other. Here, it's like that, where every track is stretched out to a couple minutes, but it feels just as meaningless and impersonal.

I'm not going to say it's the fault of this particular album that I feel this way, though; I've always found this sort of music to be really difficult to get into. The very repetitive music and minimal production results in a sound that isn't terribly engaging; but on the other side of things, it's too abrasive and random to be considered decent background music. So I'm a bit lost as to what the point of this kind of music is. I can definitely see some of these tracks having use as, say, source material for a more involved album, but on their own there just really isn't much to them.

Somewhere out there though I'm sure there is someone for whom this album will be appealing—after all, musique concrète as a genre does have a significant fanbase if I'm not mistaken. But I won't count myself among their ranks and I won't count myself as a fan of Peak of Nothingness; it simply doesn't have much of anything that appeals to me. Like my distaste for indeterminacy, I feel kind of bad blaming the album itself for being in a style that's out of my taste range, but what else can I do?

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