Eris Drew and Maya Bouldry-Morrison (aka Octo Octa) live in a log cabin in rural New Hampshire, which seems a little strange at first—so far removed from the dance music touring circuit—but it also makes a lot of sense. Radical, queer, and believers in a psychedelics-fueled liberation theology based around the Motherbeat, the long-term couple are actually so New Hampshire. The cabin, where they’ve lived since the pandemic, is the focal point of their artistic lives, where they keep a gigantic sound system they’ve used to throw their own festival in Vermont, and the hallowed turntables that they lug around to gigs across North America.
To make Alchemical Sisters, their first collaborative full-length, Drew and Bouldry-Morrison transformed the bedroom of their cabin into a hermetically sealed studio. They slept on the floor and took mushrooms for extended periods of time while weaving together an LP made from psych-folk instruments (dulcimer, anyone?), synths, and samples taken from their archive of vintage dance music. The result is a maximalist record that captures the wide-eyed, everything-at-once optimism of ’90s big beat. Those original records, by artists like the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim, evoke a time when the distance between the dancefloor and regular life dissolved, and the tracks—dance music made not for function, but for fun, anytime—swelled with the pomp and excess of rock and hip-hop.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The new record is the closest that the two have come to infusing their distinctive DJing style into their original productions. This turn to larger-than-life sounds shouldn’t be all that surprising: In their DJ sets together, they play raucous, often older records built on heady climaxes, wailing vocals, and thrashing drum beats. In 2024, Drew even released a rock-themed mixtape where she blazed through tracks by Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. Alchemical Sisters has the same brash bullheadedness from the get-go: “This Is How It Should Be Done” bursts out of the gate with a funky breakbeat and staccato vocal sample before a surging acid line upends everything, the drums change tack, and a guitar swoops in. It’s hard to tell what’s a sample and what’s original, which is probably the point.
