Consistency may be disparaged as staid, or celebrated as style. “Art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill,” writes George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, asking, “How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”
For a house-music producer, it seems around a decade of emphatic consistency really gets the goods. It’s been 13 years since Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s first album as Octo Octa and 10 since she came out as trans—or, as she puts it in the closing poem of her fourth and latest LP, Sigils for Survival, started “finally living life.” A decade of steeping both her person and music in radical preference has begotten a signature sound, one rigorously true to house music’s form and spirit yet softer, more twinkling, and laced with woodland witchcraft (such as the titular sigils). Today, Octo Octa sounds like herself, only more so.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Sigils for Survival is gently emotional, uproariously danceable, unabashedly analog, yet nonetheless pristine. In an age of endless genre hybridities, Bouldry-Morrison’s focus on acid and deep house—here made entirely on hardware instruments and mixed digitally—crystallizes as refinement, every sound carefully tuned for warmth and coherence. Internationally known as a priestess-like DJ who, alongside her partner Eris Drew, channels a mythological “motherbeat,” Octo Octa facilitates catharsis through masterfully patient and playful arrangements.
Opener “First Intention” is joyous from the jump. Across eight minutes, cheerful synths, effervescent acid warbles, and vinyl scratches intermingle in a delightful series of grooves, as a vocal interpolates the Fatboy Slim lyric “right here, right now” in a tone less demanding, more seductive. On the slower end of the album’s spectrum, midpoint exhale “…To the Divinity of Gay Sex” feels like a downtempo take on the mystic progressive-house tracks played at dawn in late-’90s clubs—think Underground Sound of Lisbon’s 1995 remix of “The Horn Ride.” Like those spacious records, it treats the kick drum less as power than presence: a low, omnipresent motherbeat soothing the jittery path to the morning. Bouldry-Morrison’s take is tenderer, offsetting alien electronics with sweet guitar strums that land like fragments of lost psychedelic pop.
Nearly nine minutes long, “Rituals to Exist & Connect” is the album’s undeniable centerpiece, a song emotionally expansive enough to soundtrack both the processing of grief and its celebratory release. The soaring bassline and racing breakbeat are propulsive, though the break’s skittering lightness—like fingertips grazing skin—recalls the softer take on breaks promoted by labelmates Bored Lord and Introspekt. Ethereal keys and pinging bells are accented by buoyant handpan riffs; countless details somehow layer to weightless effect. Then the track opens unto a signature Octo Octa portal, spiraling upward along the break’s relentless pull. “Take me up,” pleads one voice; “Come to me, reach for me,” intones another. When a final sample declares, “This is a journey”—a phrase immortalized on the 1987 hip-hop album Paid in Full—it lands like a knowing wink. Babe, we’ve been on a journey. You just took us there.
