What have we come to expect from Mr. NULL these days? Gone is the overall harshness of the music, replaced instead by a amalgam of the extreme and the subtle. But always there's tension - never get too complacent when listening to his music - the lulling ambience can at any minute rip into discord, where high, grating pitches slash and tear at the very air. In a way, the long breaks from extreme noise are more alarming than an album-length full throttle attack - it's like having an enemy you can see, rather than one you can't. The noise is, as you probably expect from this guy, harsh and nerve-jarring, ripping the very fabric of consciousness apart with evil rapier-sharp talons of shining steel. And the ambience? Deep, dark, Isolationist passages with enough edge to give you no illusions as to who or what you're listening to. It's the hum of a great malengine, a factory machine built only for evil purposes, which gradually, insidiously, shows itself for what it truly is - a hissing, squealing, twisted and corrupted mass of cacophonous noise. And somehow, in a Sci-Fi, end - of - the - world kinda way, these lethal, out of control machines revolting against their original purpose, have a malign beauty to them. Okay, so this is not what I'd call absolute heaven - after a hard, busy life, you might prefer somewhere a little more restful, less edgy and dangerous. The second, main track on this album is an interesting journey from harshness to passivity and back - and despite the coarseness of the sound, has hardly any edge. A good release spanning two totally different mood genres, and suggesting the divide isn't that wide! Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.