CODEX SERAFINI - THE IMPRECATION OF ANIMA

 

Codex Serafini have found an appropriate home for their first full-length album release. Riot Season, an independent label based in England’s Black Country region, provides an outlet for musicians that share a similar spiritual intensity with the mysterious Brighton-based psych rockers. They’ve shared a stage with Japanese neo-psych superstars Acid Mothers Temple on at least one festival date. Mahti, another labelmate, features members of legendary Finnish avant-rock group Circle. The more raucous elements in their sound have a parallel in Shit and Shine whose 2004 noise rock mantra Ladybird Riot Season has re-released in an anniversary edition. In a manner fitting for such eminent company, The Imprecation of Anima sees a broadening and deepening of the mystic energy Codex Serafini has demonstrated on their previous Halfmeltedbrain EP releases Invisible Landscape (2021) and Serpents of Enceladus (2020).

The album’s four, longish suite-like tracks evolved out of a year’s worth of jamming by the anonymous band members; most of them retain a sidewinding push and pull endemic to improvisation. With their saxophone-driven sound, Codex Serafini ride mystical jazz currents out of the auras of Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders to the charred ritual grounds of Ex Eye and Memnon Sa, pulling out trace elements along the way suggestive of stoner doom merchants Sleep and Om, space rock drifters like Slift and The Oscillation, cosmic folk entity Smote and prog-psych voyagers like Bossk. There’s an emphasis on drone and repetition to generate hypnotic focus and dramatic tension. The female lead singer has gone for a deeper, more soulful range in addition to the yelping approach used on earlier releases; her tone here recalls the petrifying regality of Diamanda Galas as often as Yoko Ono.

By structuring their music around powerful symbology, Codex Serafini have crafted something with the flavour of a concept album in The Imprecation of Anima. The title suggests the archetypes of the collective unconscious from Jungian analytical psychology. In the posthumously completed Man and His Symbols (1964) Carl Jung and his followers inform us that all the representations of the unconscious - the shadow, the anima, the animus, and the Self - have both positive and negative aspects. The shadow can be both an instinctive drive towards malice, and a development-oriented impulse. The anima and animus can inspire creativity, or they can ossify and destroy the personality. Ego and shadow are as inextricably conjoined as thought and feeling, but they are also engaged in what Jung called the “battle for deliverance.”

This pessimistic, though not hopeless Jungian notion of life as a battlefield of a “complex of inexorable opposites” filters through into The Imprecation of Anima’s lyrical and musical dreamscape. Opening track, ‘Manzarek’s Secret’, features a vocal chant reminiscent of world music avatars Popol Vuh and Dead Can Dance after an ambient opening of tinkling percussion and droning synths. The mysterious Veiled Man described in the lyrics suggests the shaman figure of ancient mythology and/or a tribute to Ray, The Doors keyboardist of the song’s title. ‘Mujer Espiritu’ cuts straight to the dilemma suggested by the album’s title - “I am the pure life/For I’m the one you love/And I’m the one you curse” - while the shortest track and potential single, the uptempo dervish-like ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ further draws out these existential tensions: “I'm sorrow, I'm lust/I'm the one you should never, never trust/I'm tension, I'm pain/ I'm the one you want to turn into clay.” The 17-minute closing epic ‘Animus in Decay’ taps into the post-metal bombast of Cult of Luna as it alludes to the war-like urges of the masculine psyche: “Once I found lust, lust in destruction/I begged for love at your mass grave.” For Jung, the anima acts as guide to the inner world in the process of individuation. Codex Serafini set up a bruising encounter with the bellicose unconscious, but one not without its own healing properties.

Codex Serafini, The Imprecation of Anima, is out now through Riot Season Records and available on Bandcamp:

https://riotseasonrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-imprecation-of-anima

(C) Text Copyright 2023 by Jon Kromka