Astronomy is an album about enormous distances made from sounds that feel almost intolerably close. Anthony Di Franco’s five long constructions surround the listener with overloaded guitar, synthesis, electrical pressure, low-frequency movement, and vast fields of distortion, yet the title directs the imagination away from the equipment and toward the scale of planets, radiation, collapsing stars, and darkness without visible boundaries. This is not cosmic music in the familiar sense of graceful sequencers, twinkling electronics, or reassuring interstellar drift. AX approaches space as mass, pressure, temperature, and annihilating distance. The universe here is not a dream of escape from Earth. It is a reminder that most of existence is violently inhospitable to human life.
By 1997, Di Franco had already spent years finding different ways to make sound feel physically dangerous. His work as JFK and Ethnic Acid explored power electronics and extreme low-frequency force, while his involvement with Skullflower placed him inside one of Britain’s most important collisions between rock instrumentation, free-form improvisation, drone, and amplifier destruction. AX gathered those experiences into a solo language that could be brutally heavy without depending on conventional songs or percussion. Astronomy takes that language somewhere especially severe. Its synthesizers, electronics, bass frequencies, and guitars generate motion without drums, allowing the music to expand and contract according to internal pressure rather than a fixed beat. What might ordinarily be a rhythm becomes an undulation, a repeating electrical convulsion, or a dense mass slowly rotating through the stereo field.
“Electron Death” opens the album by immediately treating electricity as something unstable and mortal. The title suggests both the disappearance of a subatomic particle and the death of electronic machinery itself. Di Franco’s tones seem to burn at their edges, producing a field in which guitar and synthesis can no longer be separated cleanly. Feedback becomes atmosphere; distortion becomes matter. There is movement, but it does not feel generated by musicians standing together in a room. It resembles systems entering failure, transmitting their final information as heat and vibration. The absence of drums removes the human scale that a regular pulse might provide. We are left inside an event whose duration cannot be measured except by enduring it.
“X.T.O.L.” deepens this sensation across nearly thirteen minutes. The title remains cryptic, behaving more like a code, technical designation, or abbreviated warning than an invitation to narrative interpretation. This suits AX perfectly. Di Franco does not need a story to organize the sound because the changing density supplies its own architecture. Frequencies accumulate, collide, and partially dissolve. Sub-bass movement gives the piece a gravitational center, while harsher tones spread outward like radiation from an object that cannot be viewed directly. What initially appears static reveals itself as a network of gradual transformations. A vibration becomes rougher, an upper frequency begins cutting through the mass, or a buried guitar tone rises just far enough to alter the apparent dimensions of the entire piece.
The fourteen-minute “Molten Beast” is the album’s longest track and perhaps its clearest title. The music suggests something gigantic whose body has not fully solidified, a creature composed of metal, magma, circuitry, and pressure. Yet the “beast” never becomes a simple monster stomping through a cinematic scene. It is closer to a state of matter that has developed appetite. The track’s power comes from its refusal to settle into either drone or attack. It seems continuously on the verge of becoming more violent, but its heaviness is already complete. Di Franco understands that sustained mass can be more intimidating than constant impact. A blow occurs and ends; a pressure field remains, forcing the body to adjust to its presence.
This distinction places Astronomy beyond the narrower expectations of power electronics. The album can certainly be abrasive, overwhelming, and physically punishing, but it is not primarily structured around confrontation, vocals, slogans, or sudden explosions. Its extremity comes through scale. Di Franco makes a handful of tones feel wider than the room containing them. The sound seems to exceed the speakers and continue invisibly through the walls, much as astronomical objects exceed the images and measurements through which humans attempt to understand them. Distortion becomes a tool for implying information beyond the system’s ability to reproduce it. The recording cannot contain the event, so its surfaces rupture.
“Kortex” is the album’s most widely circulated piece because it later appeared on the Metal Forest retrospective, although the original Astronomy version is substantially longer. Its title points inward toward the brain just as the album’s larger concept points outward toward the universe. That relationship is important. Astronomy is ultimately performed inside the nervous system. Stars, planetary distances, and cosmic timescales are converted into images by a small biological organ enclosed in darkness. Di Franco’s immense buzzing layers make that act of perception feel unstable. The track seems both external and neurological, like a planetary storm being received through damaged brain tissue. Slow, distorted throbs create a kind of rhythm without percussion, while the surrounding hiss and guitar mass continually interfere with any comfortable sense of pattern.
The closing “Silicon Valley” brings the album’s cosmic scale back toward human technology. In 1997, the phrase already represented the growing mythology of computing, digital networks, technological wealth, and a future supposedly made cleaner and more controllable through information. AX responds with something far less polished. Silicon becomes not a symbol of frictionless progress but another mineral extracted, processed, electrified, and forced into unstable machinery. The track’s electronic density exposes the physical underside of the digital dream. Every invisible network depends upon metals, energy, labor, heat, manufacturing, and waste. The supposedly weightless future still possesses mass, and Astronomy makes that mass roar.
The album appeared on Freek Records, the label closely associated with Matthew Bower and the wider Skullflower orbit. That context helps explain why AX could move so naturally between electronics and rock-derived noise. Di Franco’s guitar does not behave like a lead instrument, and the synthesizers do not provide a contrasting electronic layer. Everything is fed into the same weather system. Amplifier hum, bass resonance, feedback, oscillator movement, and signal overload become different forms of the same substance. The compositions are not built by arranging clearly separated instruments but by encouraging boundaries to collapse.
There is also a particular mid-1990s character to the recording. Digital technology was becoming increasingly ordinary, yet the sound of Astronomy remains thick, stubborn, and materially resistant. Its electronics do not sparkle with novelty. They grind, vibrate, and accumulate dirt. The CD format offers a wide, uninterrupted field for these long pieces, but the music itself feels physically scarred. This tension between the supposedly pristine digital carrier and the corroded contents gives the album additional force. It arrives as data while sounding like machinery being crushed into ore.
Astronomy was the final AX album of its original 1990s period, following Nova Feedback and AX II. Rather than simply escalating the earlier releases’ violence, Di Franco expanded their heaviness into something slower and more monumental. Fury became gravity. The attack was stretched until it resembled landscape, and landscape was enlarged until it suggested planetary scale. That development may explain why the record can feel strangely meditative despite its hostility. Repetition eventually changes the listener’s relationship to the sound. What first appears unbearable becomes navigable; details emerge inside distortion; enormous pressure begins producing its own form of calm.
The instruction to play the record loudly is therefore not merely macho decoration. Volume reveals how the low frequencies support the higher layers and how much physical space exists inside what might initially resemble a solid block. At sufficient level, the music stops behaving like an object located in front of the listener. It becomes an atmosphere shared by the entire room. Walls, floor, furniture, speakers, and body participate in the recording, each responding differently to its frequencies. Astronomy then fulfills its title in miniature. The listening space becomes a crude observatory, not watching distant light but measuring invisible forces through vibration.
More than twenty-five years later, the album remains difficult to absorb into a simple history of noise. It connects Skullflower’s amplifier-based psychedelia, power electronics, sub-bass experimentation, industrial music, drone, and the growing dark-ambient vocabulary of the period without belonging comfortably to any one of them. Its influence can be heard in later artists who discovered that heaviness did not require metal riffs or rapid percussion, and that electronics could possess the scale and physical authority of geological events. Yet Astronomy still feels unusually solitary. It is one person constructing an artificial universe from current, amplification, and sustained pressure, then leaving the listener inside it without protective equipment.
Anyone who owns the original Freek Records CD, saw AX during this period, or knows more about Di Franco’s studio setup for the 1996–97 sessions could add valuable detail. The equipment remains secondary to the result, but understanding how these immense spaces were physically assembled would illuminate one of the most distinctive British noise recordings of its decade. Astronomy does not gaze upward in wonder. It looks into the same darkness and hears engines, radiation, collapsing matter, and the deep electrical hum of a universe with no obligation to welcome us.
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