In pre-Hispanic times, the name of Coatlicue was on the tip of every mouth found, in the sprawling Aztec empire located in present-day, central Mexico. Coatlicue, the given Nahuatl name for the “mother of all gods”, was the earth goddess with a skirt of many snakes, adorned with human hearts, skulls, and hands. It was she whose sacrifice granted humanity both heaven and earth, but also birthed all things affecting life, death, and rebirth. Aztecs would periodically sacrifice young slave women to appease her thirst for sacrifice. She, in turn, would give birth to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god who would help us transition into our next life, after death. It was from this representation of Mother Earth, that Mexican artist Alquimia drew inspiration for her experimental ethno-folkloric masterpiece: “Coatlicue” Goddess Of The Earth.
Alquimia is the nom de plume for solo Mexican singer-songwriter Margarita Saavedra. An early career as a stereotypical balladeer singer led her to join various prog and rock bands, finally settling to go solo, and give a try to New Wave and gothic-style Pop, in the mid ’80s. In 1989, when she released her debut Monstruos Transparentes, she did so after completely taking control of her own music and production. Unable to find much of an audience for her experimental Pop music in her native Mexico, Margarita decided maybe it was time for a change.
In 1990, during a trip to Mexico City’s wonderful Museo Nacional de Antropología, Alquimia came across the statue Coatlicue. As Alquimia put it:
I didn’t know who she was, but I was impressed by that grand statue of stone, standing in front of me. I couldn’t distinguish if she was looking at herself with her two snake heads facing each other, or if those two eyes belonged to one head that was looking at me, but I felt a great respect to the mystery of her greatness.
As she discovered more about the history of Coatlicue, and her ties to other ancestral, feminine gods with many other names, Alquimia found something deeply inspiring in them that could afford her a new musical direction.
Plunging deep into Mexican pre-Hispanic music and folklore, Alquimia purposefully removed much of her superficial stylistic cues from contemporary, English alternative music and looked to her own past for experimentation. Moved by the music of Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and a lot of Krautrock (like Cluster, Kraftwerk, or Tangerine Dream), Alquimia tried to create something from the ether that could speak to both her past and a more general, unformed future.
“Coatlicue” Goddess Of The Earth was intrinsically electro-acoustic in nature. When real-life percussion instruments existed she’d use those to move the music. When more esoteric sounds were needed she would use samplers and synthesizers to create a sound that only existed in her mind space.
Never losing site of a certain sound, the music in “Coatlicue” Goddess Of The Earth both drew inspiration from pre-Hispanic music and affected that inspiration without coming across as pastiche of it. It was tribal, because it took cues from indigenous Nahuatl music (both of Tolteca and Aztec rhythmic base). It was experimental, because there was no other way to create something that could only exist by redrawing it, through some other means. There was no New Age music to affect, since this age was an imagined recreation of a promised one that never came to be. Other Mexican artists like Jorge Reyes, Eblen Macari, and Arturo Meza that you heard in my mix of Mexican Ambient, Ethno-Experimental & New Age music had similarly taken steps to signal a new direction, for a new generation mired from the past.
The album itself begins with a nine-song suite based on the Coatlicue legend. “Coatlicue Diosa De La Tierra” holds nearly thirty minutes of indescribable, atmospheric, ambient music. “Coatepec” begins the proceedings by placing you in a totally synthesized jungle where sounds are designed to affect feline, rain, and cavernous unplaceable sound. Even if you’ll never make a journey to Veracruz, you can feel the landscape of its environ merely by hearing this track. As the suite continues, you’ll notice the suite is structured as music for a sacrificial ceremony. Heavy, percussion introduces us to the titular inspiration and track. “Festividades” allow us to hear the first strains of Alquimia’s vanguardist take on vocals, pitch-shifting and resampling her own voice to affect something far more otherworldly with the hypnotic flute-led snake dance going on behind her.
“Danza de Xilonem” then begins to bring the suite to a fever pitch. Based on multi-layered a capella harmonies (all sung by Alquimia), everything from bass line to inferred percussion, is moved entirely through Alquimia’s intricate vocal overdubs and resampling production techniques. A spiritual sistren to Claire Hamill’s Voices, it’s here where we can begin to appreciate just how inspired by the feminine divine Alquimia’s album was — an idea that firmly is staked out on the accompanying track “La Dualidad De La Diosa”. Chilling, dark ambient ruminations like “Procesion” then manage to keep the intriguing atmosphere amorphous and compelling. When whispers turn to ghostly grooves, as they will in “Sacrificio”, the historical tie is knotted and Alquimia manages to honor something without losing sight of her own visionary ideas.
Take your own time to discover the rest of the album. In the rest of the songs, Alquimia would be join by members of Mexican experimental RIO (Rock in Opposition) crew Oxomaxoma to flesh out even further other themes touched on by other ancestrally divined ideas. “Alkaest” brings to mind the angular, neoclassical guitar music of Popol Vuh, third way music beyond ecumenical foundations. “Aura” then comes closest to invoking the pastoral electronic music of Cluster, albeit through a lens that speaks of folklore ages upon ages old.
Although an important release for a little-known and unheralded scene in Mexico, “Coatlicue” Goddess Of The Earth still deserves more than the pittance of attention it received when it was initially released. Shortly after releasing this album Alquimia would travel to England and plant her roots there, disappointed in the reception her music had received in her own homeland. Here’s hoping that we can do our own little part in bringing her back.
Coatlicue goddess of the earth ‘The first time I saw her, was when I visited the anthropology museum in Mexico in 1990. I didn’t know who she was, but I was impressed by that grand souse of stone, standing in front of me. I couldn’t distinguish if she was looking at herself with her two snake heads facing each other, or if those two eyes belonged to one head that was Cooking at me, but I felt a great respect to the mystery of her greatness.
‘There are several legends about her origin. Some people calf her Coadicue (skirt of snakes) some others Cihuacoatf (snake womart) Tonantzin (our mother)amongst other names. The music I composed was based on these legends:
Coatliue, goddess of the earth, is the mother of the gods Huitzilopochtli (god of the war) and Quetzalcoatl (feathered snake). Her temple was the Tlilan (blackness), refering to the darkness in the center of the earth, and it was on the hill of Coatepec. Here was the statue of the goddess made of stone. Her two snake heads facing each other, represent the finality on earth (life-death, good-evil, day-night etc). The legend says that the earth swallows people when they die, protecting them in her maternal chest. That is why the goddess keeps on her chest the hands, the hearts and the skull of her children (humanity). Therefore, it was necessary in homage, to feed her constantly with several human victims. For this reason the religious ceremony consists in choosing a girl slave that will represent the goddess, whom they coffer (Xilonem, goddess of xilote (tender corn). They would take her from one wedding to the other, from party to party, trying to keep her happy, making her drink pulque (alcoholic drink made from the cactus plant) and some other mystic beverages. On the eve of the sacrifice priestess, warriors and nobles kept awake all night singing and doing a dance called areyto with the stave Xilonem. At dawn next to a firepan that heated symbolically like an oven, they would make Xilonem lay down on the platform at the entrance of the temple Tlilan. She was offered to the goddess, and to the sun that was rising at the orient. Then she was decapitated. They would collect her blood (symbol of the precious liquid of life) in a vessel; and then they would take her heart out of her chest (the heart being the symbol of the origin of fife and emotions).
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