Corima/Upsilon Acrux/Peter Kosolov (2) @ 2220 Arts+Archives, 2/27/2025 (#13)
Zeuhl is good
The state of the Los Angeles zeuhl scene is good. Also, there's a Los Angeles zeuhl scene? Yep, there's a Los Angeles zeuhl scene. I don't know how many other Magmamites or brutal prog badasses call Los Angeles home, but Corima does…sort of. Singer/violinist Andrea Calderón now calls Mexico home, turning Corima into an international outfit. But whatever, here it was on the bar stage of 2220 Arts + Archives, ripping it up with longform prog odysseys and hinting at a new album coming down the pipeline after a few flips of the calendar pages, and if we can flip through those 2025 pages faster, please, let's do that. Anyway, new Corima? What else could you ask for? How about one of the best sets of the year? Asked for and delivered.
First, though, we got some more experimental souls. Last year, I caught Peter Kosolov when he opened for Kevin Drumm. That was one of those ear-opening sets where you realize how much someone can do with a guitar and pedals, a kindred spirit with Álvaro Domene. At this date, Kosolov played a unique style that I can only call rapid-fire squelch assault. It was noise contained to short bursts and played with a jazzy sense of syncopation. The amp howled and then whined and then cooed and then screeched. Through it all, Kosolov rocked back and forth, leaning over his instrument like he was tearing the tones out of it. But the best feature to watch was the man's feet as he pittered and pattered around the pedalboard.
Upsilon Acrux is an ass-kicker, a brutal prog monster, a two-drummer stormer. The San Diego quintet was all rhythms: some mathy, some heavy, some circular, some straight-ahead. If I had to ballpark it, I'd call the quintet something like Ruins joining forces with Don Caballero. I've always been mystified by how a band with two drummers can so effortlessly find a groove, but that's just what Upsilon Acrux did, using the setup to create these cascading beats. The guitars added yet another layer. Then, Patrick Shiroishi, the keys/sax player, who is one of the pillars of the LA underground experimental scene, added one more layer on top of that. You didn't nod your head so much as move it in a circular motion like a cat watching a sun reflection skitter across the ceiling.
You got the same effect from Corima, as if you were listening to a maze of circles within circles within circles. The five-piece, with Shiroishi getting a double paycheck, ripped through a modern version of zeuhl that trended toward the brutal prog side best exemplified by the Japanese contingent. It was less ecstatic in the Christian Vander sense and more this dizzying assault on the senses, a rhythms-all-the-way-down onslaught of complex intensity. The band built songs up to such heights that you almost felt like you'd get vertigo if they jammed out any longer. In my most Wyatt Marshall-toned sense of awe, it was a rush.
To me, Corima is at its best when it's driving hard, pushing the bounds of every members’ individual power. What makes the band tick is not that it's muscular but that it's so flexible, efficiently handling those moments when power is called for. There's indeed this virtuosic ease with which the band plays, juxtaposing the quiet and loud with the stretchy qualities of a rubber band. When the keys, drums, sax, bass, and violin all lock in, there's this sense that a universe has been created, and then it explodes, sending out each instrument to terraform its own little planet. Zeuhl is good when it is good. Corima is great.
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