Octo Octa’s fourth album ‘Sigils for Survival’ is a decade-spanning house music ritual, built on hardware and radical personal truth
Ten years is a long time to become yourself. For Maya Bouldry-Morrison, the producer and DJ working as Octo Octa, the past decade since coming out as trans in November 2015 has been precisely that: a sustained process of self-becoming, conducted in public, encoded in music, and now crystallized on “Sigils for Survival,” her fourth studio album, released April 30 via her own label T4T LUV NRG. “As an autobiographical artist, I set out to write an album that would be a milestone for this past decade of joy and sorrow,” she has said. “Sigils for Survival is my attempt to encapsulate the intentions and techniques that I used to move through life into a spell.”
The record delivers on that ambition without straining for it. The album was recorded entirely on hardware instruments at her cabin in rural New Hampshire, then mixed digitally in Logic, preserving MIDI-clock drift and off-grid timing so the machines could breathe against each other in the rhythmic pocket rather than snap to a grid. The result is eight tracks totaling just under an hour, and the warmth is immediate, tactile, and distinctly alive.
It is the beefiest sounding Octo Octa record yet, and also the most emotionally legible. For each track, Bouldry-Morrison drew a sigil, designed to bind a specific intention to the music. Her sister, New York artist Hope Morrison, incorporated each sigil into original paintings that make up the album’s artwork, closing the loop between the personal and the visual.
House Music as Survival Method
Opener “First Intention (Right Here, Right Now)“ announces the album’s stakes across eight generous minutes. Cheerful synths, effervescent acid warbles, and vinyl scratches trade in and out of a rolling groove, while a vocal reworks the Fatboy Slim lyric “right here, right now” with seduction rather than demand. It is joyous in the way that early morning dancefloors are joyous: earned, communal, slightly disbelieving. DJ Mag, reviewing the album, noted that the 128bpm pulse of “Survival Groove” mirrors the precise, self-protective stride queer people have long deployed moving through potentially hostile public space. That reading is not a stretch. This is house music understood as armor, as method, as spell.
The album’s midpoint, “…To the Divinity of Gay Sex,” operates at the opposite tempo, functioning as a downtempo exhale that recalls the mystic progressive house of late-’90s dawn sets, specifically the spacious gravity of Underground Sound of Lisbon’s 1995 remix of “The Horn Ride.” Bouldry-Morrison’s version is tenderer than its reference points, offsetting alien electronics with sweet guitar strums that arrive like fragments of lost psychedelic pop. Alongside her electronics, the album also features hand-played dulcimer, hand-pan, and recorder, instruments that push the sound toward something ritual rather than merely recreational.
A Decade Sealed in Sound
Beyond its individual tracks, “Sigils for Survival” functions as a document of ten years lived with intention, and a closing poem read aloud by Bouldry-Morrison makes this explicit. “Ten years of finally living life / I’ll fight to conjure more,” she recites. That line, delivered without theatrics, carries the weight of the entire record. George Saunders once asked how emphatically an artist can like what they like, and for how long they are willing to work to ensure every element is infused with their radical preference. Bouldry-Morrison has been answering that question for a decade. “Sigils for Survival” is the most complete answer she has given yet, and it arrives sounding not like a closing statement but like an opening incantation.
