Historians theorize that the Mesoamerican cultures (plus their cousins in the Great Basin) developed such a bloody, fatalistic philosophy due to the unpredictability of weather cycles in the region and the notoriously fickle, and labor-intensive, maize crop. Corima, the Californian progressive rock group, attempts to integrate this worldview into music on their latest release, Hunab Ku. The ensemble has been operating at the cultural fringes for more than a decade, though their marginalization is not intentional as they operate in one of the most peripheral post-1960s genres: zeuhl.
Zeuhl (if one is not aware) is a conceptualization of sound that exists in the shadowlands between jazz, metal, progressive rock, and symphonic composition. Opposition and obliqueness to the listener is in the sacred text of zeuhl. French zeuhl, where the genre technically originates, incarnates as a post-Protestant amalgam of jazz and orchestral metal, then Japanese zeuhl, where the genre reached its conceptual consummation, manifests as a postmodern repetitive chaos which, to some, hedges on unconditional torture. So is Corima pressing these borders towards a new post-territory accessible to virginal newcomers?
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Yes and no. The current Corima line-up has been together for about a decade, so there is little loose change between the players. Their sound on Hunab Ku is strong here and easier there, but it never exactly crosses into the avant-garde post-space that the groups which inspired the band, such as the Japanese Kōenjihyakkei, do. Which is to say, Corima is not the California equivalent of another group; they have a robust identity, and the one they project on Hunab Ku is doom.
Doom, in the Mesoamerican sense of the Mayans and Aztecs, where the world is a self-consuming spiral rather than a vanishing point to be achieved. A sense of doom liberated from the mammalian brain, returned to the reptile, is zeuhl’s strongest asset in how it liberates the vocalist from any sense of decorum. Zeuhl is a future-past tool where vocalists adopt a prophetic tongue without the logic or grammar of any language; the technique has often been compared to speaking in tongues. Andrea Calderón, Paco Casanova, Patrick Shiroshi, and Gopala Bhakta all take on the spiritualist activity in one mode or another across the album, bassist Ryan Kamiyamazaki is the only one without a vocals credit, but Calderón, here, is the closest the group has to a lead vocalist.
Each song is a different cycle, a different doom, but a different twist in the formal for those who like when their jazzy rhythmic chanting slides into a frigid doom metal breakdown. “Yoh’hah” and “Xock’ab” open Hunab Ku, but a sense of technical intensity does not emerge until “Manla” and “K’iik,” which begin to unveil the cyclical structure at play. While “Manla” is highly listenable and “K’iik” is highly chaotic, both are a menagerie of technique where it sounds as if every instrument in existence, up to even the glockenspiel, is included. “K’iik” itself is haunting as it rumbles through crying whines and chugging rhythm. This then feeds into the ceremonial style of “Inlilnaluk” which admits itself an eastern influence alongside a synth organ and pipes. The mythological “Ho-Huitzilopochtli-Tlaloc,” named in honor of the masked deities who rained blood and whose blood was rain, reveals the group’s Kōenjihyakkei influence with triumphancy. The album then closes off on the thunderous climax of “Kultunlilni,” which allows Corima to put into practice the physicality of zeuhl, an advancing wall of sound. The only thing the Corima ensemble stops short of on Hunab Ku is breaking out the Aztec death whistle for the conclusion.
Is one left with a sense of doom once Hunab Ku concludes? Undoubtedly, but it is a refreshing doom. This is the doom of the flesh: the ruin of murals, the forgotten faces of gods in masks of many nations, and technical music skill on parade. It is a pleasant change of pace to be reminded of an impending disaster that is personal rather than a de-personalized, structural force. Even if Corima takes another decade (erm, another cycle) to get around to another album, this formation of Corima has proven there is still a little bit of the knife-prick in the digital music environment, no matter how fringe. Hunab Ku is music to be felt in the rattling bones, not in the beating heart.
–William Pauper
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Hunab Ku is available now via Soleil Zeuhl.
