Codex Serafini Premiere “Mujer Espritu” Video; The Imprecation of Anima Out Now
Posted in Bootleg Theater on July 26th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
UK-based cosmic freak rockers Codex Serafini weird-willed their debut studio full-length, The Imprecation of Anima, into being last month in conjunction with Riot Season Records, and on Friday they’ll bring their interstellar mycological exploration to Kozfest in Axminster, featuring alongside Lacertilia, Black Helium, Øresund Space Collective and a slew of others on a three-day bill. This terrestrial to-do will lend the generally-multidimensional-plus-sax unit a broad showcase for The Imprecation of Anima, and its four varied excursions into the uncharted void will no doubt prove transportive to those in attendance. Lucky ducks.
The LP/DL release is a moment toward which Codex Serafini have spent the last couple orbital periods building. 2020’s Serpents of Enceladus, 2021’s Invisible Landscape (review here) EPs and the earlier-’23 live record, God’s Spit saw Codex Serafini refining their own math — a base 47 number system — and largely eschewing the thrust one associates with space rock in favor of capturing the slow churn and atomic collisions, fusions and fissions, of nebulae and shapeless gas clouds, the kind of thing usually shown to humans in lush color so that research gets funded. Stellar nurseries. A psychedelia of star formation, processes unfolding over millions of years as giant flaming balls of hydrogen are born, burn unfathomably hot, and are eventually recycled. To state the blanketly obvious: longform songwriting suits their purposes well.
Begun with chimes and shakers to announce the start of mass, “Manzareck’s Secret” (9:40) is playful between ride cymbal and tom punctuation, with sax laced over, vocals echoing out, keyboard drone. It gathers itself after the first two minutes, decides it’s time to go, and looks back not once as it absconds into crashing sulfuric chaos, dissipating for a verse now tenser and a departure into a wormhole wash resolved before six minutes in with a quick bout of bass noodling under a more lumbering riff. But it doesn’t stay long, and like space itself, Codex Serafini‘s material is always changing, always moving even when it doesn’t seem to be, processing time in its own time; a fluid thing. Various shouts are peppered in with the guitar solo and vocals follow the path to the next apex, settling into the feedback from which the 15-minute “Mujer Espritu” (video premiering below) rises, again, at first with a quiet ride cymbal tapping away, but a backing drone swirl and deceptively steady bass are there as well. Have you taken a deep breath yet? Maybe an inhale right at 1:05 as the sax starts to enter? There you go.
A meditative sprawl tells you to let all the distraction drop, and it’s good advice to take. Given the volatile nature of the opening track, there’s an undercurrent of threat in “Mujer Espritu,” but like Dutch cosmopolites Temple Fang before them, Codex Serafini know there’s no need to rush it, and through a midsection that comes across as improvised at least in some part but fully dug-in either way, they slowly build to where the snare taps get harder and volume swells, recedes, pushes, and finally, surges with a larger and solidified rolling riff around which the guitar, bass, keys and saxophone align, unabashedly heavy with vocal incantations alongside. Not missing the opportunity to depart from the departure, the three minutes of “I am Sorrow, I am Lust” are a relatively straightforward interpretation of the band’s sound, the sax growing playful in jabs, drums marking the changes, vocals giving human presence in the freakout, recalling that original era space rock was proto-punk as well, one thing bleeding into another and the idea that they should or would be separate ridiculous in the first place.
“I am Sorrow, I am Lust” cuts out with all its Stooges-via-Hawkwind strut, and the partial title-track “Animus in Decay” (17:15) contrasts “Mujer Espritu” in quickly diving into its first verse. Desert rock guitar and drums circle around the sax, hinting at Eastern scales in a way consistent with what’s come before, but more concerned with movement in the jam, which is brought to a proggy head five minutes in and then breaks to lub-dub heartbeat drums and way, way back vocal lines, guitar strums for emphasis, toms working back. They’re already in the next build before you realize it, and for about the next 10 minutes, Codex Serafini adventure through astrojazz and classic-heavy-informed guitar leads, shouts in the void semi-melodic and vague, but reassuring before the blastoff after the 12-minute mark seems to pull that voice down a tunnel of effects. The weird get weirder.
Do they dare bring back the circular runs from earlier in the song? Oh, they dare, but the riff accompanying is fuller in its distortion and the outward trajectory of the song, album and band will be plain even to novice auralnauts. They pull back ever so slightly and then throw themselves and everyone else into the last wash, consuming as it would have to be and with a residual rumble of low frequency noise left over from its own Big Bang.
And in the tradition of that theory of universe creation — which basically rounds out to, “well, there was a thing and then there was everything” — one hopes Codex Serafini over the next few billion years will grow likewise expansive. The Imprecation of Anima isn’t overly harsh, but it is extreme music and should be appreciated as such. Still, the band’s robe-clad interstellar persona is only just developing, and one looks forward to how it might evolve and to what undiscovered dimensions it might lead.
As noted above, the “Mujer Espritu” video premieres below. More PR wire info and the album stream follow.
Please enjoy:
Codex Serafini, “Mujer Espritu” video premiere
After releasing two EP’s, ‘Serpents of Enceladus’ in 2020 and ‘Invisible Landscape’ in 2021 Codex Serafini embarked on their most immersive journey so far creating what would become ‘The Imprecation Of Anima’ an exploration of the self, the duality of the human existence. The album is heavy, much heavier than their previous output and the albums longest song, ‘Animus in Decay’ is longer than either of the band’s previous EP’s.
It snakes and weaves an epic motif through the wilderness of the sometimes barren lands of the unconsciousness, focusing the mind with it’s almost heavy metal mantra and using this to open up the third eye to the realisation of our mortal existence. The whole album is a pilgrimage into ones inner self and it’s relationship with it’s own shadow in it’s truest form, two parts coming together as a whole.
LP Tracklisting:
1. Manserick’s Secret (9:40)
2. Mujer Espritu (15:33)
3. I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust (3:02)
4. Animus In Decay (17:15)
Live photo: Estie Joy Photography
Album art: Ana Maria Terr
Codex Serafini, The Imprecation of Anima (2023)
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