AX - Vulcanalia (LP)

Noise titan Anthony Di Franco (Ramleh, JFK) returns to his perennially influential and long dormant AX project for the first time since 1997's 'Astronomy', pitching into pure, beat-less feedback/amp-worship on a crushing and expansive new album of manacled, atonal guitar + synth + FX slowly edged into oblivion. Big boned, highly recommended listening FFO Kevin Drumm, Stephen O’Malley, Kevin Richard Martin, Mika Vainio, E.A.R. Di Franco was just 21 when he started the AX project in 1993. He'd been a member of Matthew Bower's influential noise rock band Skullflower since he was 16 and was their full-time bassist by that point, playing on classic sides like 'IIIrd Gatekeeper' and 'Obsidian Shaking Codex' before being tapped by Gary Mundy to join Ramleh. The idea for AX was to create music without drums that was just as heavy as the extreme noise and sludgy rock that surrounded Di Franco at the time. And so, using a cheap 4-track, an arsenal of guitars and a few synths and effects to strip out the rhythm and focus solely on the weight of the sound, the project produced three albums - 'AX II', 'Nova Feedback' and 'Astronomy' - records that have remained cult touchstones for dedicated drone fanatics ever since. One year since the mighty, psyched-out return of Ramleh with ‘Hyper Vigilance’, Di Franco appears clearly gassed on a new energy in ‘Vulcanalia’, wherein he revives the alias with the benefit of lessons learned since that last album three decades ago. For the duration, he touches scorched grass in his most elemental guise, sustaining combustible harmonic overtones and biting-point distortion thickened with re-thought production techniques, from mic placements to amp sorcery and FX, factored by obsessive, extramusical cues from Roman mythology and religion. The results live up to his intention - to plunge users in the midst of the lushest tempest - in order to overwhelm himself and us. Nothing exceeds quite like excess, and this one delivers in glacial spades. Numbed drones grow in shivering intensity to a vision-blurring electromagnetic stormfield on ‘Elagebal’, culminating in a keeling, blackened wave that never breaks, whereas ‘Jupiter Best and Greatest’ allows for more harmonic colour in the sustained density of his synths and axe, rising and dashing souls on distant noumenal, isolationist shores. ‘Aedes Saturnus’ evokes a necessary lull in the storm, dialling everything down to a sort of still water depth and dread that builds from below, boiling waters that turn to caustic treacle one the 12 minute titular closing, set to immure the senses in a style of doom wrangling that hears the influence of his Ramleh and Skullflower works which also fed into E.A.R., SoMa, and Kevin Richard Martin, returning home to roost.