2008's Absolute Magnitude is the latest album from the reunited Japanese noise/improv/industrial/rock duo Absolut Null Punkt, which features drummer Seijiro Murayama (who used to play in Fushitsusha back in the late 80's) and KK Null (from Zeni Geva, natch) teaming up for another go-round of blistering freeform noise blat. Some of the older ANP albums like Ultrasonic Action treaded closer to a kind of industrial thud-rock similar to that of Zeni Geva and Swans, but the recent ANP albums have gotten progressively more abstract and noisy, and WAY more psychedelic. Which is ace by me. Absolute Magnitude doesn't really have anything that I'd describe as a riff, and the duo certainly don't come near the crushing angular noise-metal of Zeni Geva, but Null's guitars do get pretty damn extreme on this disc, spewing out thick jets of howling, bleeping, soaring effects-blasted guitar noise that sound more like the sort of stuff you'd hear on one of his solo albums, only here it's backed by the propulsive drumming of Murayama, whose rhythms often slip into a killer hypnotic throb that turns some of this stuff into a sort of super-abstract computer-battle krautrock. On the other hand, the second track explodes into full-on chaos, Murayama bashing and skittering crazed anti-rhythms and clanging industrial percussion that smashes headon into Null's distorted, mangled spaceship FX. Gets pretty heavy, in fact.

The first track starts off with a six minute splatterfest of pounding, tear-down-the-walls improv drumming, dense squalls of harsh industrial noise rushing in from opposing directions, and bits of jacked-up synth squiggle and raygun photon blasts zipping around all over the place; all of that electronic

blat and Null's thoroughly mangled guitar skronk suggests the crazy spaceship chaos-scapes of his noisier solo stuff, but melded with a furious, almost free-jazz-style percussive assault. But when it hits the midway point, everything drops out except for a smattering of random bleating electronic noises, and then the band rebuilds the track slowly into a throbbing, pulsating sci-fi krautrock jam, the drums pulsating beneath robotic synths and streaking high-end effects, and it gets pretty dense and hypnotic as the band rides this noisy, psychedelic groove to the end.

But track two is way more abstract, a sprawling soundscape littered with busy tribal free-drumming that percolates in a haze of damaged synth noise, wheezy digital glitch, Null's weirdly processed guitar that he somehow manages to turn into a screaming sax-like bleat, stretches of spatial percussion and random sounds, and Moog-y synth arpeggios. And the third track essentially combines all of the elements that came before into a massive thirty minute jam that takes you from Nullsonic brand starship bleep to super-distorted industrial/free improv dirge to furious blasts of way-out guitar skronk and hammering drumbeats, wandering in and out of more of those wicked overdriven synth/drums workouts with wild looping prog-style arpeggios that circle around Murayama's treated drumming.

Comes in a full color digipack.