There are myriad factors contributing to our troubled age, but many of them can be traced back to a critical inflection point, ten years ago. That’s when we saw the election of Trump in the US and the Brexit referendum in the UK. For anyone of a remotely liberal persuasion, geopolitical events seem to have been on a downward trajectory ever since. This year also marks a decade since Octo Octa (real name, Maya Bouldry-Morrison) came out publicly as transgender, thus Sigils for Survival is “…a milestone for this past decade of joy and sorrow”, and as she further explains, “…my attempt to encapsulate the intentions and techniques that I used to move through life into a spell.”
The autobiographical nature of Octo Octa’s music becomes clear when considering the evolution of her discography over the last ten years. From 2012’s Between Two Selves, a record of moody deep house, shot through with pensive uncertainty to 2017’s Where are we Going?, which offered a more uplifting aspect but was still some way from carefree abandon. That came on 2019’s Resonant Body, which incorporated breakbeats into Octa’s sound, along with a looseness and physicality not present on previous albums, suggesting an artist more comfortable in themselves.
Given the dark forces that seem to have been coalescing against the LGBTQ+ community in recent times, one might expect Sigils for Survival to betray a pessimistic mood. But if anything, it’s Octa’s most overtly hedonistic and relaxed record yet – a defiant celebration of the unifying and liberating power of dance music.
Setting the tone for the record and the mindset it embodies, Right Intention (Right Here, Right Now) leads with the iconic siren call known by ravers the world over, the Roland TB 303. The pulsing acid riff drives the energy of the track and situates us squarely in rave music’s 90s heyday. Some of the slogans from that era have lost their potency, ending up as hollow cliches through over-use, but by repurposing them as her ‘sigils’ Octa imbues new urgency into phrases like Keep Pressing on and Just Listen. The tracks are fairly standard fodder, Keep Pressing On is a groovy house jam; breakbeats, soulful piano and a funky bass hook that hits in all the right places. Just Listen draws from the Bleep Techno sound of early UK rave, with raw pulsing bloops, sirens and Roland drum-machines united in riotous clamour to drive the energy.
After a sufficient head of steam has been built up on the record’s first half, the percolating acid line of Hypnotic Cycle leads us down a more lysergic rabbit hole, before the album’s midpoint …To The Divinity of Gay Sex which offers blissed out views of a chillout room, draped with bodies entwined in ecstacy. The fact that Sigils sounds like something of a rave time capsule is due in large part to the fact it was recorded on hardware, and thus captures the instinctive feel of live performance.
This approach is most fully realised on Rituals to Exist and Connect, a mini-epic in the mould of the early 90s innovators (Future Sound of London, The Black Dog, The Orb etc) who elevated the sounds of rave away from the dancefloor and into a more cosmic and cerebral realm. Beginning with a back-and-forth breakbeat and chiming hand-pan, it builds to a psychedelic climax furnished by whirring arpeggios and some deftly placed samples, the obligatory “take me up” of course, and buried deep in the mix, the classic “This is a journey into sound”. First deployed by Coldcut on their remix of Eric B and Rakim and since plundered by countless beat-heads, remixers and DJs, it situates the track on dance music’s glorious neverending continuum: the journey that started way back and is still going strong.
Octa’s own voice closes out the record with a poem, the final lines of which “Ten years of finally living life, I’ll fight to conjure more” acknowledge the decade past and the journey yet to come.
George's Music Blog 