Distraxi - Colour Of The Sky | Album Review

For the past 4 years, Alina Church (AKA Distraxi) has been diligently firing out some of the most incendiary harsh noise and power electronics available to tape deck owners. She’s prolific. Notching up releases for the likes of experimental powerhouses Outsider Art, Eggy Tapes, Death To Dynamics, Hard Return, and Summer Interlude Records. Her live shows are formed from acts of violent catharsis, smashed scrap metal, ruinous feedback, and an apparent lack of care for self.

Colour Of The Sky is her second outing in just over 18 months for the Deal-based noise-stalwarts Brachliegen Tapes. In a fit of nominal determinism, Church is showcasing a spiritual facet on this tape that has perhaps been a little overlooked. There have been previous grapples with religious concerns, including dropping references in the shape of album and track titles – Birth of Eve, ‘You Turned My Temple Against Itself’, and Gilgit-Baltistan Crucifix, for example – but this release specifically aligns devotional notions of self-sacrifice with bodily alienation. The separation of church and corporeal state, it is not.

Opener ‘Lay Down And Die’ finds hymns of oblation subjected to ferocious obliteration. Through songs of chanted worship, a flaming cloud of distortion rises, engulfing all. The voices are flanged, twisted and spun, giving the impression of a preacher ranting through a voice-garbling megaphone. The vocal mutilation continues with anguished howls roaring through a bristling loop on ‘Spirit Through Fire’ and, prior to that, ‘Dead Tranny (Gnosis)’ features vocals buried deep within a wash of caustic static.

As the album progresses Church’s guard drops ever so slightly. Making it as far as ‘A Prayer Of Instinct’ appears to win some trust because, amidst a battle of velocity and dynamism, volition and movement, amongst a squall of sounds whipped back and forth, her initially obscured voice calmly intones, Genesis P-Orridge-esque, with spoken word clarity: “Do you like what I did to your temple?” and then, later, “It's revenge for what you did.”

There’s a sense of looking in from the outside to this too. Particularly during the writhing undulations of subterranean action that make up ‘True Blood Of Christ’. It sounds like the throb of nightclubs heard from the exterior but mutilated into a nauseating churn. A locked loop playing out in the chaotic aftermath of Gaspar Noe’s dance class sleepover gone horribly wrong, Climax.

But the real masterstroke is the bold, cinematic composition that forms the entire second side of this tape. The title track takes heavy battering rain and adds in blistering synth lines made up of blown out waves folding in on themselves. Fluctuating pitches cut through, struggling against the collapsing soundscape of swivelled knobs and twisted time. Church is riding a gargantuan distorted tsunami that threatens to break but, instead, hovers there, on the verge of crescendo. Through the dense, rabid fog, tones and frequencies dance, scatter, and discombobulate. Shrieks spiral as notes swoop and plummet. It’s an all-out war of pinpoint self-flagellation until clouds darken the sky and wash it all away.

If the body is a temple, then whatever revenge Distraxi has wreaked upon this has left its sacrificial altar overflowing with red-lining, brick-walled cacophony. 

The old gods are never happy.