Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Ax - (1997) Astronomy CD
One of the strangest pleasures of maintaining a large music archive is discovering evidence that your hands once knew an object your conscious memory no longer recognizes. The photographs remain. The disc was extracted, encoded, named, compressed, uploaded, and placed into public circulation. Every step required physical attention, yet years later the personal episode has disappeared while the resulting transfer continues to exist. This earlier rip of Astronomy therefore possesses an unusual second atmosphere before the music even begins. It is not merely a copy of Anthony Di Franco’s 1997 CD. It is evidence of an encounter that survives more clearly in files and images than in memory, a tiny archaeological site created by one’s former self. That condition suits AX perfectly. Di Franco’s music often sounds as though some immense event occurred earlier and left behind only scorched signals, magnetic residue, distorted machinery, and vibrations continuing long after their original cause has vanished.
Astronomy was the third and final AX release of the project’s original 1990s period, following Nova Feedback and AX II. Across those records, Di Franco developed a territory between guitar noise, power electronics, bass-heavy industrial music, drone, and the physically overwhelming psychedelic extremity associated with his work in Skullflower, Ramleh, JFK, and Ethnic Acid. The earlier AX material could feel brutally immediate, with distorted bass and guitar pushed forward as blunt physical forces. Astronomy does something more difficult. Rather than simply increasing the violence, it slows and enlarges it. The sound becomes less like an attack delivered from a stage and more like an environment whose pressure has always been present. There are no drums to establish ordinary human motion, no vocals to explain the emotional stakes, and very little recognizable rock structure. Five long pieces proceed through vibration, density, repetition, and gradual mutation.
“Electron Death” begins with the album’s most compact statement, although nothing about its seven minutes feels small. Its title suggests the destruction of a particle, the failure of a machine, or the extinction of an entire technological order. Di Franco avoids the obvious language of sparks and frantic malfunction. The track is slower, heavier, and more mysterious, allowing tones to decay while other frequencies push through them. Guitar and electronics lose their separate identities almost immediately. What remains is an overloaded surface containing several kinds of motion at once: low tones turning beneath the floor, harsher signals collecting above them, and electrical textures rubbing together until they produce the illusion of heat. The piece does not portray a dramatic death. It sounds more like the residue left after the decisive event has already happened.
“X.T.O.L.” is nearly twice as long and even less willing to provide recognizable landmarks. The title resembles an abbreviation from a private technical manual, military system, astronomical chart, or industrial warning label whose meaning has been withheld. This absence of explanation becomes part of the music. AX does not tell the listener what object is being heard or what process is underway. Instead, Di Franco establishes a field of distorted matter and lets the ear search for patterns inside it. Repeated tones create a rhythm without percussion, but the rhythm never becomes completely dependable. It swells, slips, becomes partially obscured, and returns under changed conditions. This instability prevents the piece from settling into passive drone. The listener remains alert because every apparent plateau contains internal movement.
“Molten Beast,” the album’s longest track, provides the clearest image and then immediately complicates it. The title promises something monstrous, but the music does not behave like a creature with limbs, footsteps, or a voice. It resembles a gigantic body before anatomy has fully formed, a mass of liquid metal gradually developing intention. Its heaviness is continuous rather than theatrical. Di Franco understands that extremity does not require a constant series of impacts. A sustained frequency can become more oppressive than a blow because the body has no clear moment after which it may relax. The sound occupies the room, alters the apparent weight of the air, and forces everything around it to become part of the composition. Furniture, walls, speaker cabinets, and the listener’s chest begin responding according to their own resonant properties.
This emphasis on sustained mass distinguishes Astronomy from noise records designed primarily to shock. Its power becomes clearer with time rather than being exhausted during the opening seconds. Distortion functions as material rather than decoration. Each layer has grain, thickness, and apparent temperature. Some passages feel metallic and abrasive; others resemble dense clouds whose edges cannot be located. Beneath them, bass frequencies create slow physical movement that may be sensed before it is consciously identified. The album’s instruction to play at high volume is therefore practical rather than merely confrontational. Loudness reveals structural relationships concealed at modest level. What first appears to be a solid block separates into currents, cavities, pulses, and overlapping bands of pressure.
“Kortex” is the one piece later chosen to represent Astronomy on the Metal Forest retrospective, but the original album gives it a much longer life. Its title turns attention from the external universe toward the biological machinery attempting to perceive it. Every image of outer space is ultimately manufactured inside a brain enclosed within a skull. Stars become electrical activity, distances become concepts, and unimaginable scales are translated into patterns small enough for consciousness to hold. “Kortex” seems to occupy that border between external event and neurological response. Its thick buzzing layers could be radiation crossing a planetary atmosphere or overstimulation passing through damaged tissue. A submerged pulse repeatedly suggests order, but the surrounding mass keeps interfering with it.
Hearing “Kortex” inside the complete album changes its meaning. On a compilation it becomes a strong isolated example of AX’s later sound. Within Astronomy it is part of a larger migration from breakdown toward technological enclosure. The tracks do not tell a literal story, but their sequence gradually brings the scale closer to human manufacture. “Electron Death” begins at the particle level; “Molten Beast” suggests unstable matter acquiring life; “Kortex” introduces the interpreting brain; and “Silicon Valley” ends in the earthly system built from minerals, circuits, money, ambition, and promises of a frictionless future. The progression moves from physics to organism to industry, although every stage is heard through the same damaged electrical language.
“Silicon Valley” is especially striking in retrospect. In 1997, the phrase still carried a powerful futuristic glow. The expanding internet, personal computers, digital communication, and information industries were presented as gateways into a cleaner, faster, more intelligent civilization. AX responds with thirteen minutes of weight, corrosion, and electronic stress. Silicon is returned to its physical origin as processed mineral rather than treated as an invisible synonym for progress. The digital world depends upon extraction, factories, electricity, heat, labor, hardware, discarded components, and enormous material systems concealed behind smooth interfaces. Di Franco’s track seems to hear all of that hidden mass at once. The future is not weightless. It hums, overheats, consumes power, and eventually becomes waste.
The original CD format strengthens this idea. Compact discs were still presented during the 1990s as nearly perfect carriers, clean silver objects whose encoded information would supposedly escape the wear associated with vinyl and tape. Astronomy uses that polished digital surface to deliver music that sounds corroded, unstable, and physically overburdened. The contrast is beautiful. A laser reads precisely arranged data, but the resulting sound suggests equipment operating beyond tolerance. The medium promises permanence while the music describes collapse. Decades later, the physical disc, photographs, and personal rip introduce another contradiction. The object may disappear from memory while its digital double remains available, quietly proving that it once passed through someone’s hands.
This particular transfer now has meaning beyond convenience. It preserves not only the album but a listening history distinct from later remasters, compilations, and lossless copies. Every rip is an interpretation made through available hardware, software, settings, file formats, and the intentions of the person performing the transfer. Even when two versions derive from the same commercial CD, they travel through different systems and acquire different archival lives. One may preserve artwork more fully, another may carry different metadata, and another may survive because its link was copied into an unexpected corner of the internet. They become parallel witnesses to the same object.
Astronomy itself encourages this kind of listening because it never presents sound as a transparent window onto a stable source. Everything has already been transformed by amplification, distortion, recording, mastering, playback equipment, room acoustics, and the physical limits of hearing. There is no pure original event waiting underneath the noise. The mediation is the music. AX makes electricity audible not as invisible service but as a volatile substance with density and behavior. A signal is created, driven into overload, preserved on a disc, converted into files, forgotten, rediscovered, and played again. Each stage adds another orbit around the record.
The album now feels less like a period artifact than an unresolved transmission from a technological future that arrived in forms few people anticipated. Its vocabulary of overloaded systems, invisible networks, neurological pressure, and enormous electronic environments has only become more relevant. Yet Astronomy remains stubbornly unlike the polished digital world surrounding it. It is rough, slow, unhelpful, physically demanding, and unwilling to convert itself into easily consumable information. It asks the listener to enter five extended fields without vocals, beats, or narrative guidance and to discover movement inside apparent stasis.
Perhaps that is why forgetting the physical CD does not diminish the significance of having handled it. Memory is not the only form of preservation. Sometimes a rip, a photograph, an upload date, and an old post retain what the mind releases. Astronomy has crossed that strange boundary from owned object into recovered evidence. The disc was present, the work was performed, and the files remain. Anthony Di Franco’s music waits inside them like a machine left running in an abandoned observatory, still measuring forces too large to name.
