For fifteen years Maya Bouldry-Morrison has signed her records as Octo Octa. Active on the international scene, today she lives in the woods of New Hampshire together with her artistic and life partner Eris Drew. “Sigils For Survival” arrives seven years after the previous solo album and was born ten years after Maya made her journey as a transgender woman public; she describes the work as a way to fix that decade: a period in which she often felt she couldn't make it, and which for this reason she felt the need to celebrate with an entire recording chapter. We are talking about an acid house that dances without limits on every similar territory, from the bottom funky and progressives to matrix chords black music. The title reflects a habit of the artist, that of drawing a seal on the vinyls he plays: not a simple graphic quirk, but a talisman designed to face life itself.
His sister Hope Morrison, an artist active in New York, took these symbols and transformed them into paintings, which then became the cover and visual material of the project. The same organic method is reflected in the writing of the songs: unlike in the past, when he worked with Ableton Live and software of all sorts, here Maya played and recorded everything on machines hardwarereserving only the final mixing phase for the computer. Above all, he chose to never correct the tracks by bringing them back to a precise metronomic grid, leaving it up to the machines themselves to dictate, through their own temporal drifts, the natural breath of the groove: a choice that winks at the club culture of the Nineties and that gives the whole thing warmth and humanity. What is especially striking are the more complex progressions and the more intricate rhythms: this is where the record puts its muscles and makes itself heard.
The sound palette is not limited to synthesizers and drum machinesbut also opens up to an occasional and thoughtful use of acoustic instruments, fromhand pan on the recorder. The final amalgam oscillates between dense and layered episodes and more sparse, presumably hypnotic moments: it is the former that convince the most, because in the latter the mantra remains a whisper and the spell does not click. However, when Maya intelligently navigates trance arpeggios and touches breakbeats And bleep buttons that overlap in a joyful chaos, that's where the magic takes shape: physical, sweaty songs that live with an almost tribal energy under a dawn of fury and brotherhood. Living between astral excesses and synthetic jungles, Octo Octa's latest effort convinces when it becomes living flesh, less so when it remains suspended in its own rituals.
02/07/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
