Octo Octa &c

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

no dedicated Eris Drew thread but the latest mix is incredible: https://soundcloud.com/eris-drew/eris-drew-mystery-of-the-motherbeat-vol-2-3

Thanks for posting!

Seconded!

for deep listening and personal synchronization with the heart of Motherbeat

count me in this is 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

It really is! It’s like a much better version of that Pangaea album everyone got weirdly and unjustifiably excited about.

New DJ mix from Octo Octa:

https://octoocta.bandcamp.com/merch/groovy-girl-bang-the-drum-cd-mix

Physical media is _CD_! Oh my God, is this the first stirrings of the hipster CD revival? Not to worry, it's streaming on Soundcloud for those of you who just got rid of your CD players.