Octo Octa – First Intention (Right Here, Right Now)
Octo Octa (Maya Bouldry-Morrison) releases “First Intention (Right Here, Right Now)” as the lead single from Sigils For Survival, her fourth album on T4T LUV NRG, the label she runs with Eris Drew. The record dropped April 30th. It follows Resonant Body (2019) and marks ten years since she publicly came out as transgender in November 2015.
The album was built entirely on hardware instruments and mixed in Logic, deliberately preserving MIDI-clock drift and off-grid timing rather than correcting it, letting the machines find their own rhythmic pocket. Alongside her signature electronics, Bouldry-Morrison plays dulcimer, hand-pan, and recorder, and her voice is back too. Each of the eight tracks was written around a specific intention, then bound with a hand-drawn sigil. Her sister, New York artist Hope Morrison, translated those sigils into paintings that form the sleeve artwork, with layout by Joรฃo Ervedosa and mastering by Carl at TruTone.
“‘Sigils For Survival’ is my attempt to encapsulate the intentions and techniques that I used to move through life into a spell”, Bouldry-Morrison says. The sigil concept could easily tip into affectation, but what grounds it is the hardware-first approach: there’s nothing abstract about how this music was actually made. The drift and texture are in the recording itself, not added after the fact. That’s what I keep coming back to: the process and the intention feel like the same thing here, not separate layers.
Sigils For Survival is out now on T4T LUV NRG. Written and produced by Maya Bouldry-Morrison.
