Metal Forest is not simply an AX anthology assembled for listeners who missed the original Freek Records releases. Its sequencing transforms Anthony Di Franco’s scattered 1990s work into a new environment, one where recordings separated by several years grow together until chronology becomes less important than density, pressure, and atmosphere. The collection begins with “Kortex” from 1997’s Astronomy, then steps backward into material from Nova Feedback and AX II. Instead of presenting AX as a project moving neatly from beginning to end, Cold Spring places the listener immediately inside its most developed sound and then opens pathways into the earlier machinery beneath it. The effect resembles entering an established forest and gradually discovering the older layers of growth, fallen matter, buried roots, and mineral deposits from which it formed.
The title is perfectly chosen because AX rarely sounds like either untouched nature or completely controlled technology. Di Franco creates an artificial wilderness where guitars, synthesizers, feedback, bass frequencies, electronics, and overloaded signals behave with something resembling organic independence. Sounds branch, decay, crowd one another, and spread beyond their apparent point of origin. A tone may begin as recognizable electronic equipment but soon acquire the unpredictable grain of wind, insects, fire, moving water, or distant animal activity. At the same time, none of this becomes pastoral. The trees are conductive, the soil vibrates, and every clearing contains another engine. Metal Forest describes a place where industrial matter has reproduced until it possesses its own ecology.
“Kortex” serves as the ideal entrance. Removed from the much longer architecture of Astronomy and placed at the beginning of this compilation, it becomes a concentrated statement of AX’s mature method. Distorted pulses rise through dense hiss while low frequencies establish a slow, bodily rhythm without conventional percussion. The title points toward the brain, suggesting that the forest may not exist outside the listener at all. It could be a neurological landscape produced when repeated frequencies, pressure, and electrical abrasion begin reorganizing perception. AX does not provide images in a cinematic manner. The music stimulates the mind until images generate themselves, different for every room, playback system, and physical state.
The transition into “Nova Feedback 1” immediately loosens that structure. Rhythm dissolves into drifting layers, and the music appears to lose its center while remaining intensely controlled. The word “feedback” is important throughout Di Franco’s work because feedback is both sound and relationship. A signal exits a system, returns through it, and grows according to the conditions it encounters. The result cannot be attributed entirely to musician or machine. It is a negotiated instability. Di Franco works inside that unstable circuit, shaping forces that always retain some potential to escape intention. This gives even the most sustained AX pieces a feeling of alertness. Their surfaces may appear static, but every frequency is capable of becoming the cause of another event.
“Heavy Fluid” captures the project’s central contradiction in two words. Fluids move, spread, and adopt the shape of their containers, yet this one has enormous mass. The track unfolds through bass vibration, electronic hum, guitar atmosphere, feedback, and occasional percussive debris, creating music that seems to flow while resisting movement. Its extended duration allows pressure to accumulate without forcing a conventional climax. Di Franco’s restraint is crucial here. A lesser recording might continually add layers to prove its intensity, but “Heavy Fluid” understands that one carefully sustained low tone can alter a room more completely than dozens of frantic gestures. The listener begins to notice not only what emerges from the speakers, but how the surrounding space responds.
“Theme One” presents the opposite tactic. Compact and violently compressed, it turns psychedelic guitar noise into a bright, shredded wall. Di Franco’s history with Skullflower becomes especially relevant in moments like this, not because AX sounds identical to that group, but because both discovered that guitar could be separated from riffs, virtuosity, and ordinary rock hierarchy. The instrument becomes a generator of friction and luminosity. Distortion does not conceal the music; distortion is the material being composed. “Theme One” feels almost ecstatic in its refusal to stabilize, a flash of white electrical vegetation growing too quickly for the ear to follow.
The title track then opens a deeper and more cavernous region. “Metal Forest” allows guitar destruction and reverberating electronics to develop distance, giving the impression that sounds are occurring at several points within a vast enclosed landscape. Some seem close enough to touch, while others appear to echo from behind immense structures. This manipulation of acoustic scale is one of AX’s defining abilities. Di Franco can make modest equipment imply impossible architecture. The listener is never given a reliable map, only changing evidence of size, surface, and direction. The forest expands whenever an echo fails to return from where expected.
The two pieces taken from AX II occupy the collection’s most abrasive territory. Their lack of descriptive titles leaves the listener without even the small narrative assistance offered elsewhere. Wavering electronics, shrieking frequencies, engine-like abrasion, and blackened atmospheric noise must stand entirely on their own behavior. This anonymity suits the material. The tracks feel less like illustrations of named concepts than exposed sections of an operating system. One hears forces entering conflict, signals being forced through resistance, and unstable tones struggling to preserve themselves inside surrounding interference. Despite the harshness, the work is not careless. Di Franco maintains a strong awareness of duration and density, knowing when a sound requires reinforcement and when it becomes more threatening by being left alone.
“Nova Feedback 2” reintroduces a more recognizably psychedelic motion. Guitar emissions stretch into vapor trails, then return through repetition and processing as though the original gestures have been copied by malfunctioning machinery. AX’s relationship with rock music is especially intriguing here. The emotional charge of amplified guitar remains intact, but the structures that usually contain it have disappeared. There is no band performance to imagine, no drummer defining forward movement, and no vocalist occupying the center. Rock’s electrical body survives after its social body has been removed. What remains is amplification remembering the sensation of performance.
“Cluster” closes the disc with a buzzing drone that seems fully present from the moment it begins. Rather than leading toward a revelation, it establishes a concentrated zone and remains inside it, allowing tiny variations in texture to become the entire narrative. The title may refer to a grouping of sounds, stars, machines, or cells, but its greatest usefulness is structural. AX gathers frequencies so closely that they begin functioning as one object while never completely losing their individual friction. The piece is meditative, though not peaceful. It offers the peculiar calm that can emerge after the body accepts an extreme environment and stops waiting for ordinary comfort to return.
The remastering and compilation process inevitably changes how these recordings are understood. Their original appearances were tied to separate objects, years, formats, and sequences within the brief life of Freek Records, the label connected to the wider Skullflower, Consumer Electronics, and Bodychoke network. Metal Forest removes selected pieces from those original neighborhoods and places them into a later Cold Spring framework, where they can be heard alongside subsequent developments in drone, death industrial, dark ambient, and extreme electronic music. The collection reveals how far ahead AX had already travelled. Many later artists would discover that heaviness could be created without metal riffs, that rhythm could be implied through low-frequency oscillation, and that noise could function as immersive architecture rather than a succession of shocks.
Yet the disc does not make AX sound comfortably historical. These tracks remain resistant, physically demanding, and strangely solitary. They do not appear interested in joining a recognized movement or satisfying a genre’s established rituals. Di Franco’s background moved through power electronics, psychedelic noise, rock, bass experimentation, and electronic composition, but AX became a private zone where those languages could dissolve into one another. Metal Forest makes that zone easier to enter without making it safer.
Played quietly, the collection can resemble a sequence of distant industrial landscapes. At greater volume, its internal structure becomes more apparent. Bass frequencies support and bend the harsher layers; feedback reveals cavities within the apparent walls; the listener’s room begins contributing resonances of its own. AX is music that recruits the playback environment. Speakers, floors, walls, furniture, and the body become additional components in the circuit. No two rooms can reproduce exactly the same forest.
Metal Forest consequently functions as both preservation and transformation. It rescued substantial portions of two scarce vinyl albums and one track from Astronomy, but it also created a new route through Di Franco’s work. The absence of chronological order prevents the collection from becoming a museum display of steady development. Instead, early and late recordings communicate across time, revealing persistent fascinations with electrical mass, unstable systems, distorted guitar, and sound powerful enough to alter physical space. Anyone who owns the original Nova Feedback or AX II vinyl, heard AX’s early live appearances, or knows more about the equipment and recording circumstances behind these sessions could add valuable detail. The forest is mapped here, but much of its machinery remains hidden among the trees.
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