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.
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.
“Just Listen” is another journey, propelled by intoxicating, glitchy acid beyond the lyrical-conscious plane toward realms of wider exploration. Synths undulate slowly, like hills on a desert horizon, while pointillist runs of 303 beeps burble to surprising heights before tumbling back to baseline. The machine chatter is whimsical, designed not to be understood but to work your body until you gratefully lose a bit of your mind. “Hypnotic Cycle” disorients further, living up to its title with widening gyres of metallic flanger and wobbly synth that blur the line between dread and anticipation. It’s vaguely unsettling, yet as it evolves, you begin to crave the very sounds that initially grated. Resolving into an ecstatic stomp, the track performs another signature Octo Octa alchemy: transmuting irritation into pleasure, friction into release.
Today, such release is sorely needed. Bouldry-Morrison’s commitment to trans people, queers, and ravers at large extends beyond her co-management of T4T LUV NRG and into the music itself; see “Keep Pressing On,” which over glowing chord changes and soulful bass extols a joyful gospel of persistence. The exuberance feels hard won; to “press on” implies the existence of something to press against—undoubtedly the anti-trans hostility and ambient fascism under which she currently works. With percussive keyboard stabs and samples of “Go!” and “Feel it!”, the 10-minute “Survival Groove” carries on the upbeat resolve, while a softly falling synth sounds a note of weariness. Surviving isn’t always thriving—though the yelps that gradually overtake the track suggest it gets progressively more enjoyable as one leans into the freedoms of animality.
By the time the skyward-reaching synths of closer “Eighth Intention (Turn the Wheel)” dissolve into ether—bookended by the sound of a struck match and the artist’s closing incantation—you may find yourself wanting more of the record’s grand, explosive release. But perhaps restraint is the point. As Buddhist traditions warn against grasping, Bouldry-Morrison seems to understand that bliss, no less than sorrow, can’t be clenched indefinitely; the spell works best when you just let go.
