Codex Serafini are a psychedelic rock band with a cosmic twist, hailing from what they describe as their home on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. Currently residing in Sussex, the enigmatic group claim to channel otherworldly energy, blending ritualistic and mystical elements into their music. The band’s mythos weaves through time and space, drawing inspiration from ancient shamans, free spirits, and visionary thinkers. Their Earthly journey officially began in 2019 when they crash-landed into the Sussex music scene.
Codex Serafini’s sound is a heady fusion of psychedelic rock, pulling from human musical history to create something designed to elevate the minds of their listeners to higher planes of consciousness. Their two EPs, Serpents of Enceladus and Invisible Landscape, laid the groundwork for their latest and heaviest release to date: The Imprecation of Anima.
The Imprecation of Anima is more than just a record—it’s a sonic journey through the subconscious. With its hypnotic heavy-metal mantras and mind-expanding motifs, the album seeks to guide listeners into a confrontation with their own shadow selves. Codex Serafini crafts each song like a pilgrimage, blending primal energy with philosophical reflection, merging darkness and light in a swirling, cosmic dance.
We caught up with band members Weeze and Anna earlier this summer at ArcTanGent Festival to talk about their creative process, upcoming shows, and the inspiration behind their interstellar sound.
Hi guys do you want to introduce yourselves.
Hi i’m Weeze, its short for Louise and I’m the drummer in Codex Serafini
Hi I’m Anna, short for Anna haha and I do vocals in Codex Serafini.
What can people expect from a Codex Serafini set?
Weeze: Well we have a lot of material so we can kinda pick and choose, we can either go down the doom route or we can be a bit more upbeat but for ATG we’re doing mainly faster short and sweet songs to showcase our whole back catalogue and we will be very fresh because the music always comes first so we’ll party Thursday and take it easy Friday and eat our oats and vegetables.
Anna : All the red peppers and tomatoes. Eat your vegetables at ArcTanGent so you don’t die!
Where are you getting your vegetables?
Anna : From My Tent 🙂 hahaha
Leaning into the absurd with a band name referencing the Codex Seraphinianus, your music still retains a heavy and emotional bearing. How do you balance dabbling in the absurd when writing serious music?
Weeze: Well theres a very fine line between the absurd and the serious, very serious things can very quickly tip into the absurd and all it takes is someone to laugh or find it a bit weird, but the whole knife edge thing is maintaining the illusion that it’s very serious, everyone is in on it and if the audience is in on it we all end up in this liminal space which is exactly where we wanna be.
Anna: I think its just the whole experience where you combine the mystical with the reality and form this weird show and its inclined to be serious but absurd at the same time , you cant be too serious, i’ve seen so many bands who take themselves so serious and kind of form a barrier between themselves and the audience and we try to have the audience as part of the experience and we become one.
You’ve previously described The Imprecation of Anima as “a pilgrimage into one’s inner self” – We’re roughly a year out from its release, how has the record changed in meaning for you as a group now that the dust has settled?
Weeze: I think it’s still a journey and we’re still discovering ourselves through the lyrics and music we’ve created and it’s still valid and as time passes we go deeper into the music and deeper into ourselves.
How is your creative process?
Weeze: We tend to write together, the way we did the album we used to all live in Brighton so we’d practice every week and record everything on someones phone and just play and get really into the vibe with jams that lasted like half and hour and then pick and choose the best bits and develop those ideas but it was all about the music actually happening in the room together and cutting out all the stuff we didn;t want in there but it was all very natural and very organic.
Anna: I think in terms of lyrics as well we would just jam and for me the lyrics would come after and I would sit down at home and think about the concept and what mood I was in right then and get a spark and bring those ideas to the next practice.
Weeze: I always knew if we were on to a good thing if Anna was into it and would be able to easily work something out but if it wasn’t really working we’d just move on but it was really usefull having Anna there listening as I was using her as my validation “If you’re into it, I’m into it”
Adorned with red ritual robes on stage, how is the use of costume important to your overall sound and self identity as a group?
Anna: Its very important, i got really inspired by a book called Luigi Serafini, its quite a weird surreal book with its own alphabet and weird drawings and i just kinda flicked through and i though well what if we have these costumes and masks, the first costumes we had I was just at home sewing them all by hand, I thought we’re all equal in the band, theres no front person cos i’m not a front person, everyone is an equal part, Weeze is the front drummer for example, so i thought i f we all look the same everyone is equal and we can’t be recognised.
Weeze: It also means if someone can’t make a gig we can bring in other musicians which we’ve had to do a couple of times. We have this band but we also work with a lot of other musicians as a sort of collective but theres usually just the 5 of us live.
Anna : We have had about 10 different musicians involved, our first drummer went off to start his own project and our original sax player left and then we went on the search for a new drummer and kinda got desperate and got Weeze in hahaha
Weeze : Ah Thanks, Yeah after lockdown when things finally started opening again, just before covid all my bands had come to an end and i wasnt really playing drums but then i just booked a practice by myself and took a video saying i’m drumming again and posted it to instagram and i was wearing a codex serafini t-shirt and thats when they contacted me.
Anna: Pleeaaaassseeee be in my band
Weeze: It’s been about 3 years now and if you get it and you know then you know! If it doesnt click for someone then thats fine.
What are your festival essentials?
Anna : Silent disco headphones on the Mars Volta Channel, Suncream and a raincoat (And booze)
Weeze: This year i printed a transcript of a yoga routine cos your phones gonna run out of batteries , its hard work watching bands all day in your 30s. Join us for Yoga with Weeze at 11:35, I’ll have Britney mic.
A good book for some downtime and a print out of the clashfinder , as long as its on paper you cant go wrong.
Anna: Oh my god one year i had all my lists written down but i didn’t write which stages the bands were playing, so had a panic trying to figure out which stages they were playing. I guessed Meshuggah had to be the main stage though hahah
Whats next on the horizon for Codex?
Weeze: Well we have a show on 14th December at the Cupboard Music All-dayer at the Hope & Ruin in Brighton then on 15th December we join Dawnwalker and Maebe at Hope & Anchor in London and i guess after that we’ll just focus on the next record and write a lot of new music. We won’t know our next steps properly until we start taking them though.