Octo Octa &c

man this is such a fun vibe

was just coming to post that!

just a passing note that the "let's do it" sample in "Find Your Way Home" is buried deep in Cathy Dennis's "Touch Me (All Night Long)"

did not know that cathy dennis co-wrote kylie's "can't get you out of my head". this thread is about cathy dennis now, sorry

she's the best

wait till you find out about Rob Davis

Just Announced: June 26 // NY Pride weekend closes out with @octo_octa and @ErisDrew taking over the Ruins. The T4T LUV NRG founders bring an electrifying sense of urgency and joy to the decks, weaving between classic house & rare rave gems.

Tickets ➤ https://t.co/h1RZGFiYTL pic.twitter.com/Pns64nCTJX

— KNOCKDOWN CENTER (@knockdowncenter) May 4, 2022

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017khg

Interesting to hear Eris bring up the egg crack analogy in a context that's not explicitly transfeminine. There are these implications to the idea of egg cracking that are kind of similar to what "woke" used to mean before it got weaponized as a term of abuse. I guess the idea of "egg cracking" is different in that it typically has observable, concrete, and specific results.

octo octa is still so good you guys. eris is finally landing with me too. different styles for sure but i can imagine how their energy is related.

yeah eris took a while to click with me, less immediate, but her stuff is starting to click.

honestly while listening to that interview i entirely forgot how rare positive trans representation is in uk media, which was really nice.

this is an incredible eris jam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2QqStJQzeI

Finally saw Eris Drew DJ at Freerotation on the weekend and holy shit she is one incredible DJ - total vibes, great tunes and massive energy all underpinned by incredible technical ability. My friends and I have all since got tickets for the next Corsica Studios residency on August 5th.

yes, mad skills!

New Eris Drew / Octo Octa split single is funnnnnnnnn

Octo’s “Stars and Water” either doesn’t remember that humanity decided to leave the “let’s slow the track down and then speed it back up again” trick (per “French Kiss”, “Belfast” and “The Rockefeller Skank”) in the nineties, or doesn’t fucking care.

it's fun for me because i have like zero knowledge of any of this stuff, it's all new to me, and no space in my brain to be even remotely knowledgeable about it the way i was about rock music.

maybe this is just me projecting my own shit onto her work but for me transness is _iterative_, it's just doing the same shit countless other people have done before you, and it doesn't matter if everybody else has already done it because _you've_ never done it before

to me it feels like the lack of centralized/agreed-upon assumptions w/in discourse as far as which histories are 'overrepresented' and which ones are 'underrepresented,' whats 'trendy' and what's 'normie,' it makes it hard for maneuvers to sound as easily 'played out' as they once did ... ie nardo wick doing 'tom's diner' melody, which was so oversaturated and played out, and now feels like as fair a maneuver as any other, partly bc im just getting old, and partly bc the multitude of choices, the unfettered access, makes knowing something democratized, and having truly secret information a rarity...idk.

the trade off is that certain discursive maneuvers are definitely overexposed and tiresome, but art itself manages to survive attempts to stamp it out

another way I think abt it is the increasing alienation of a very online life makes ppl miss 'common ground'

it's just doing the same shit countless other people have done before you, and it doesn't matter if everybody else has already done it because _you've_ never done it before

i don’t necessarily disagree with you, but sometimes when people (some people?) do this we call it cultural appropriation, so i think the formulation there might be incomplete? or maybe there’s no such thing as cultural appropriation, and everyone is just iterating

this appeals to me somewhat because i think “cultural appropriation” is a weak critique in general, though i also can’t sit too comfortably w the idea that bradley nowell et al are just “iterating” toots and the maytals

the nice thing abt house : techno culture is that iterating is built in, i guess. last night i was listening to mfon’s “ron hardy’s ressurrection” and akio milan paak’s “version city episode” remix and jr vasquez’s “my loleatta” (as ellis-d) and thinking i will just never get sick of tracks that iterate on elements of the loleatta holloway “dish-a-pella”. then i heard a derrick carter track i’d never heard before, and it was a cover of jean carn’s “was that all it was”, etc…

it's just doing the same shit countless other people have done before you, and it doesn't matter if everybody else has already done it because _you've_ never done it before

I think you need to have this attitude to make house & techno at all, or maybe any music, given what's come before.

I think as we get older we also become more aware that every idea tends to have a point of origin or two that we didnt know about

"i don’t necessarily disagree with you, but sometimes when people (some people?) do this we call it cultural appropriation, so i think the formulation there might be incomplete? or maybe there’s no such thing as cultural appropriation, and everyone is just iterating

― the late great"

lol i'm not touching the "cultural appropriation" argument, if that's a critique someone wants to make i'm not in a position to challenge that

"another way I think abt it is the increasing alienation of a very online life makes ppl miss 'common ground'

― xheugy eddy (D-40)"

for me it's not a nostalgic thing. i'm not yearning for a return to the '90s. that sort of "common ground", the hegemonic narrative, was one that didn't have any place for me. it's rebuilding something from the roots in a way that has a place for me. like, a lot of stuff i work towards within the queer communities i operate in is sort of reinventing the stuff that's been done by christian institutions for ages and ages. but christianity doesn't really have a place in it for queerness, at least that's my opinion, so iteration means doing the same things it did in a new way.

Octo’s “Stars and Water” either doesn’t remember that humanity decided to leave the “let’s slow the track down and then speed it back up again” trick (per “French Kiss”, “Belfast” and “The Rockefeller Skank”) in the nineties, or doesn’t fucking care.

― Tim F, Tuesday, September 6, 2022 3:41 PM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

she did it on "spin girl, let's activate!" too! i feel like it's just really good timing. so much of h&t now is just good timing plus a fun toolbox.

replaying that remix she did for dj q out lately, it's a high water mark of her recent stuff imo.

not sure if this one was ever posted itt, it's a belter

fatherhood - mural (octo octa remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYUQaHk0gIs

one thing people might miss when talking about octo octa is, i think she really takes off from the butch femme gentleness and sophistication that terre thaemlitz has at his best in melodies and chords. which of course comes from some sources (see that tt collection of old deep house tracks that showcase that light, gentle, euphoric sound). i think octo octa is really gifted at bringing out a certain plush beauty that's somewhat tough but feminine to the core. she had so much of that kind of energy the one time i saw her, and it all just bled into everything she played.

i'm a huge fan if you couldn't tell.

"a certain plush beauty that's somewhat tough but feminine to the core" is a good description of her music

"another way I think abt it is the increasing alienation of a very online life makes ppl miss 'common ground'

― xheugy eddy (D-40)"

for me it's not a nostalgic thing. i'm not yearning for a return to the '90s. that sort of "common ground", the hegemonic narrative, was one that didn't have any place for me. it's rebuilding something from the roots in a way that has a place for me. like, a lot of stuff i work towards within the queer communities i operate in is sort of reinventing the stuff that's been done by christian institutions for ages and ages. but christianity doesn't really have a place in it for queerness, at least that's my opinion, so iteration means doing the same things it did in a new way.

― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, September 6, 2022 6:02 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk what this has to do with nostalgia unless its nostalgia for a time when ppl went out dancing more and were isolated less; when dating wasn't outsourced to swipes, when hanging with friends wasn't outsourced to parasocial podcasts, when restaurants werent delivered by paper bags. i'm not saying nostalgia for monoculture as much as an appreciation for 'common ground' between people, irl relationships. I mean, 'french kiss' was hardly hegemonic just bc it was something that became 'obvious' among an extended community, even if it was a hit

like, wouldn't resentment about the 'obviousness' of french kiss gimmick be a critique of hegemony's eye of sauron reducing the effectiveness of a particular artistic maneuver, not a nostalgia for that hegemony

idk what this has to do with nostalgia unless its nostalgia for a time when ppl went out dancing more and were isolated less; when dating wasn't outsourced to swipes, when hanging with friends wasn't outsourced to parasocial podcasts, when restaurants werent delivered by paper bags. i'm not saying nostalgia for monoculture as much as an appreciation for 'common ground' between people, irl relationships. I mean, 'french kiss' was hardly hegemonic just bc it was something that became 'obvious' among an extended community, even if it was a hit

― xheugy eddy (D-40)

"people", though... who's "people"? the stuff you're talking about in your litany of "remember when" is stuff i do _now_, hanging out with friends, going out to restaurants and coffee shops, dating. in the '90s? in the '90s i was a miserable fuckin' mess. there's for me the Before Time, this unimaginably hellish way of living. the '90s for me was trolling and flaming on Usenet, being isolated, not having friends in person, all of the things you say define The Way We Live Now. trans time, queer time, trauma time, there is no past, present, future, no progress, no regression. there is only _now_.

I mean I was in high school in the 90s and not going out at all, lol, and I resist all the time (tho I do feel their pull certainly more than I did pre smartphone) the weird social media based drive toward atomization and away from community, I of course don’t claim that as a universal experience though! I’m trying to describe an overarching trend as representative of a yearning for resistance to existing technological trends, not universalize my own experience

Or to put it another way, a lot of 80s-90s culture is worried about top-down authoritarian dictates of culture, cf songs about the government telling you you can’t do this or that, or admonishing us for watching too much tv. In such an environment, the mass exposure of a simple creative technique can ruin the technique by association, by a feeling of overexposure.. I’m trying to suggest it’s a lot harder for us to be “overexposed” to a technique, that we are all much more aware of the multiplicity of niches, that there can be some insanely popular song that you completely avoid and never come across, and so using its techniques doesn’t feel as particularly loaded politically

Anyway this was intended to be a supplement to what you were saying not a contradiction of it, just another perspective

rushomancy you should listen to French Kiss :)

Anyway this was intended to be a supplement to what you were saying not a contradiction of it, just another perspective

― xheugy eddy (D-40)

oh that makes total sense and i 100% agree! sorry, just didn't get what you were saying initially :)

rushomancy you should listen to French Kiss :)

― Tracer Hand

listening to it now, it's cool but music like this is so _contextual_, it's body music and it's 7 in the morning, i haven't had my coffee, i'm listening to this streaming on youtube on my shitty computer speakers in my tiny apartment alone, and this is clearly not the environment. particularly when listening to unmixed versions of tracks, every one of them has this slow intro where it builds up from nothing and that's not how one experiences these in person. there's one intro per set and the rest is just music.

oh god it just turned into a sexy slow jam with the orgasm noises, this is kinda gross tbh? to me, this like, represents a male view of sexuality? there's a synth squiggle and it absolutely, this is like "whole lotta love" levels of stuff here. i like "whole lotta love"! though i prefer, these days, the tina turner version, because there's something i love about hearing a woman singing about her dick.

like it's hard to put into words, particularly speaking as someone who doesn't come from an electronic music background and doesn't know very much about the history and culture, but there's something about her music that conveys feminine _empowerment_, i don't see her music as "tough" or "hard" just like... _energetic_. one of the things i hate most about patrick cowley's influence is the classification of hi-NRG as masculine, and even though i'm not masc myself i like upbeat music a lot! i mean i'd look at something like picopop which is _extremely_ energetic and _extremely_ femme.

regarding slowing a song and speeding it back up, i just... like, i don't even hear that as what octo octa is doing here, like, yeah, she's got a separate section in another BPM, it's as much "batdance" as it is "french kiss". the _point_ isn't that it slows down or speeds up, it's taking things in a new direction, looking at the subject from a different perspective, a different angle. it's like nirvana getting called pixies ripoffs for alternating quiet and loud sections in their songs. the slow section is deliberate but it's also... i mean it kinda reminds me of pink floyd's "obscured by clouds"! which, again, propulsive and ethereal at the same time.

really - and this is my background - i hear it more as a prog-rock suite kind of thing than something like french kiss, which is only interested in one thing and it's fucking disgusting :) there's a sense of being in _the moment_ rather than driving towards a climax.

lil louis literally only wants one thing and it’s fucking disgusting

i’ve always thought octo octa and especially eris drew are really really phenomenal djs, eris’ “raving disco breaks” in particular is some next level shit imo. their productions are not bad, but in my mind not nearly as inspired

however since i’ve had it on the brain (due to thread revive) i remember that the one production i keep coming back to over and over again is octa’s “power to the people”. i remember first time i heard it was a club situation, knowing the dj (friend) i “knew” it was off the (then new) resonant bodies album (which i hadn’t yet heard at all at the time) … i remember when the speech picked up and the kick came back i literally stopped dancing to boggle at how good the track was

the speech always seemed familiar to me, wasn’t sure why until last winter when i checked out a cspan talk with author / director of “how to survive a plague”. it’s act-up member bob rafsky, clip is in the film and excerpted in the cspan talk. a film well worth seeing

look at this shit, i was just introducing my girlfriend to octo octa, telling her how much resonant body meant to me (she had the same experience with tami t, which if you haven't heard tami t it is absolutely _peak_ transfem experience) and i'm looking her up on RYM and not only did she release vol. 2 of love hypnosis (which i missed out on a cassette of, serves me right for my life being a complete fucking disaster) but she put out this record on archive.org last month:

https://archive.org/details/minimal-tears-one

i really need to listen to more eris drew, i haven't heard nearly enough of her stuff

also here fwiw

https://minimaltears.neocities.org/

wtf, how was i sleeping on eris drew, this shit is fucking amazing, maybe it's because i don't go see a lot of djs - soon as i came out covid hit and since then ... i guess i could do dance nights and stuff, i don't really sleep these days, i'm just out of the loop what with not doing the socials and all.

Nice The Art of DJing feature on RA here:

https://ra.co/features/4145

eris’ “raving disco breaks” in particular is some next level shit imo

this sounds awesome, got a link to any particularly good sets?

i think one of the things that is really clicking with me right now, revisiting octo octa and eris drew's music, is this sense of _emergent_ transness. early in transition, octo octa's music was... not life-_saving_, but life-_giving_ to me. it gave me something to hope for. so much trans music is this sort of 4tran miserablist stuff and dysphoria is a _thing_, feeling bad is part of being trans. transition is a huge change, and that change is a good change but it's often difficult and it hurts, and sometimes it feels hopeless.

t4t luv nrg gave me something to look forward to, trans not as _becoming_ but as _being_. not just being, but t4t was this vision of a _community_. the worst thing about the dysphoria, for me, was feeling like i was the only one who felt that way, and so when that song with that hook, "i know exactly how you feel" came in, i knew she was right, she did.

and then covid and the slow collapse of my marriage fucked that all up. community stopped being about joy and was just about survival.

once we decided to all pretend covid was over and my marriage was dead, i wound up finding joy in community in other ways. that's the thing that i love about maya and eris's music now, just seeing how _many_ ways there are to be trans. when i look at maya and eris, i see accomplished, passionate, and fiercely loving women, women who know who they are and who love being who they are. maybe that's projecting, maybe they're just mirrors and i'm saying that because that's how i see myself.

but the thing is i also now see and value the ways in which i'm _not_ like them. i got friends who go out and dj all night and i think it's super cool and it's just not something i've gotten into really. i guess i could, i'm not really sleeping anyway, but the drop is brutal, and mushies don't play well with my mood stabilizers, and when you try to set up a date with molly a lot of the time tina shows up instead, and i just wind up doing t4t in other ways. my friends and i, we lie together, quiet and still, and hold each other and tell each other it's going to be ok.

anyway that's one of the things i love about their music now, the way it's about the joy of being in the moment, that it's one sort of transfem music and black dresses is another sort and tami t is another sort and that's without even getting into the whole panoply of _transmasc_ music which is its own amazing thing.

but what i also love about it is something that confuses a lot of people, in that it's not necessarily _obviously_ trans music in the way that, say, _transgender dysphoria blues_ is. trans music doesn't mean singing songs about being trans, it doesn't even have to be music that's _universally recognizable_ as trans. i got trans friends who hear maya and eris and they're like "wait, what's trans about this?" because transness isn't universal, because t4t doesn't mean every trans person for every other trans person. that used to bother me but now i think it's beautiful, that we're as different from each other as cis people are from each other.

new EP kicks ass

oh hell yeah

It does! I don't know what it is about her music. I've changed a lot in the past four years. I'm not really into the "T4T" thing like I used to be. Something about her music just resonates, just hits something within me, some deep trans joy. Trans joy isn't something I've really felt a lot of lately. It's good to know it's still a thing I'm capable of experiencing.

this is really great

Nobody told me about the Bored Lord album that came out IN NOVEMBER on T4T LUV NRG so now I am angry with all of you