The Mix 043: Eris Drew & Octo Octa

Back-to-back DJ sets are a strange quirk of dance music. Taken on face value, they are a form of collaboration, with two artists sharing a stage in front of a single crowd. But in reality, taking turns on decks is often a mostly individual experience – a game of push and pull between DJs as they alternate one track after another.

Yet seeing Eris Drew and Maya Bouldry-Morrison (AKA Octo Octa) take to a pair of Technics together, pumping their distinctive infusions of old skool house, electro, breaks, trance, prog and much more, all while juggling turntable somersaults, there’s something that feels different. Playing three tracks each before swapping over, their joint sets are marked by a shared love of the mystical and ecstatic that makes it difficult to separate their records.

Of course it’s hardly surprising. Sharing a home in the New Hampshire forest, they are perhaps Western dance music’s premier power couple, whose T4T LUV NRG label celebrates the romance that the pair share, as well as their overlapping interests and tastes. Having been DJing for nearly four decades between them, they have an encyclopaedic record collection that can float anywhere between dusty deepness and soaring kiss-your-mates euphoria.

To wrap up a rollercoaster year across dance music and beyond, we invited the pair to record Mixmag’s final instalment of The Mix in 2024, with a joyous hour of house-rooted music that lands as a fitting bookmark for the series that we launched in February. In the accompanying interview, they discuss building their own soundsystem, the power records can hold over memories, the dancefloor as a place for communal experiences, and whether the world is ready for a big beat revival.

It’s the end of the year, how’s 2024 been for both of you?

Eris Drew: It’s been a difficult year in so many ways, but also a year with some really wonderful moments, too. Some of the events were really special this year, and Maya and I have a soundsystem (LUV NRG Soundsystem) that we’ve been putting together with our friend. We completed our fall tour with the system and those events were really special. Bringing this custom rig to share with different people in different places, it’s our way of really bringing the party.

It's interesting, there’s a big culture of custom soundsystems in certain genres, like dub of course, but not that much with house and techno. What did you want to be able to do with it?

Octo Octa: Well the US electronic scene is small, so to really do stuff in the US outside of New York, you need a DIY spirit with everything you do. There’s not a lot of infrastructure, and places like Chicago only have a couple of clubs even though millions live there. So being two Americans that really love doing this, we wanted to bring a really wonderful soundsystem to spaces that don’t normally have it, because most spaces don’t. It’s also a rave idea – when you go to parties in places where there’s not a club there, everyone brings everything for it.

ED: Back in the '90s when I had my most intense mind and body cracking experiences, these were all underground parties and those systems were badass. They were amazing, and a difference between the scene now when I came through was that they would advertise the system on the flyer for the parties – that’s how central sound was.

OO: Yeah, it would say something like: “25 kilowatts of sound”.

ED: The idea is taking from dub culture, and there’s a little bit of The Loft [influence] mixed in there. These soundsystems were incredible in the '90s and there was quite a bit of pride in them, and so we just wanted to bring some of that commitment and energy.

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Do you think you managed to channel that? Were there any parties that felt like the '90s?

ED: Oh my gosh, we can’t single any one out.

OO: No, they were all great. We did it in Rochester, New York, which has a nice scene but it’s still small. We did the same thing in Boston. We brought the soundsystem to New York and threw a party in a space called Chocolate Factory that does have a soundsystem, but we pulled out their one, put ours in and did an extended 12 hours in there with Russell E.L. Butler. Each space was different, and that’s what was truly magical about bringing a system in – we augmented it for different spaces. And for places outside of New York, we were bringing something that’s just not there. We also worked with local crews, we bought a truck and we’d drive it to the location and there would be a bunch of people who would come and help us unload it, then afterwards while everyone was really high on ecstasies they would help us put stuff back into the truck. People wanted to give time and energy with us to do a special thing.

ED: There’s one [party] I’ll point out because I think it illustrates what we’re really trying to do here. We rolled into Rochester with our box truck that we call ‘Lil T’, and this crew of folks was there who volunteered to help us set it up. The event was in a rock ‘n’ roll venue – it had heavy metal posters on the walls and stuff like that. We brought the system in and everything was soft-textured, and everything sounded really amazing in that room because it’s built for live sound – it’s not a warehouse. We turned the lights down and it reminded me of what we used to call “parties” back in the rave scene, which meant a smaller kind of system beatdown in a loft or something. It looked amazing and Maya and I ripped the set pretty hard.

Do you think having your own system shapes what you play music-wise?

ED: Yeah, totally. With the way that we’re configuring the system, we really want to be able to deliver mid-range depth and detail that I really think makes old records sound amazing. In the same way that dub systems are made to extend certain frequencies they want to bring out in the records they love, that’s what we want to do with the music we like. A lot of that has to do with the midrange – the voices, keys, synths all having their own space. A lot of club systems sound really flat, and that’s not the fault of the clubs – this is really hard to get right and that’s something we’ve learnt. We have a beautiful system, you set it up outside it sounds like a hi-fi.

OO: But in certain warehouses it sounds kind of mushy. Each space is different, how it sounds. It’s made us realise too, in some clubs people try as best they can with the sound but sometimes it’s also the space. It’s a ton of work to make something sound good in a lot of spaces.

ED: A lot of sound people say you have to start with the room, even if you have a great system.

Read this next: The 20 best US rave anthems of the '90s

Watching you both play, the word that springs to mind for a lot of people is ‘connection’, both to each other, but also with your records and the dancefloor. Why is sharing so important to you?

OO: I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I’ve been in bands, had wonderful DJ partners and worked on music with people. It wasn’t just because I fell in love with her later, but Eris thoroughly encapsulated everything that I love about dance music – what she would play and how she would talk about it. When we met, I was in her car and she was playing me UK hardcore records, some Morales dubs and stuff that I loved that I didn’t feel like I knew anyone else that had the same connection to it. So a lot of our early relationship was sharing our music with each other and just finding that the Venn diagram is almost a circle – the sheer overlap of what we find and love about everything, and what we’ll share with each other was really significant in a way that I didn’t always have with everyone else.

So having someone that cares so deeply and hears the music in the same way that I do, who sees the connection between everything, is something that I love and I think really makes what we do together really unique. We still mix in different ways and gravitate towards different records, but I don’t think she’s ever played me a song I don’t like. When we fall in love, we speak of being one body, it feels very true and that’s extended to how we present our art and play music.

ED: Part of the fun is just having fun over the records. Having someone else who wants to live in this little world of music with you is such a special thing. I’ve also had special music connections with some of my other friends in the past, but none of them were based around love. When Maya and I first started to share music with each other, we were super in love, finding out ways to play together and were sharing a ton through all these really beautiful experiences. So while I’ve got buddies that I like to play music with, there’s not been that sense of romance and love that is just so full of the music that Maya and I like to play together.

OO: We talk to each other through the records, so I hope that extends out to when other people hear us. That’s our base, where we started from.

Of course, love evolves with time – do you think the way that you play together has changed over the last years?

ED: It hasn’t changed much, I don’t think. We’ll have little musical roads that we like to go down together, like: “Let’s listen to a bunch of Spanish breakbeat.”

OO: Yeah, what we play shifts down the years, but when we play B2B we’ve been very dedicated to having the exact same formula since when we started – we each play three records, I’ll play three and then she will play three. Every time we play together, we alternate who starts, so ever since the first B2B we have been essentially keeping track the entire time. We found what our technical recipe was from literally the first time we played together.

Eris, you spoke about not wanting to play your favourite records that much because you have a lot of memories attached to them.

ED: I would say that in every given set there will be at least few of my favourite records. But there are certain ones where a moment was so powerful that I know it can never be replicated. Then I get worried that it won’t be the same, and that song has been committed to that subjective moment for me. And then it’s almost like I have to wait and maybe at some moment it strikes me that this is the time again. Once it has the weight of this really intense moment, it can mean I’m either going to play it every set for the next three years, or have it in this other space.

OO: When we play records, they get infused with the memories of the moments of the things that happen. It’s all magic that’s being put into these things, so sometimes it gets channelled into that record and that record, and you’re like: “That might be it for a while. How am I going to hit that high again?” But sometimes those records will come back out for really specific [situations]. Like I go back to a club that means a lot, or those extended sets where there’s going to be durational dancing, and I can maybe build up to that space where that record can have that kind of impact. That doesn’t always happen, especially when you’re touring in summer, it’s festival season, and you’re playing two-hour sets. Certain records need their time and space, and the right moment to do it – there’s so much magic in it for us, you want it to hit properly.

I see, like where is the magic in playing a record that means a lot to you when you’re somewhere that feels a bit generic?

OO: Yeah, it’s like when you play the record and the crowd go and get a drink or something. This is my magic record – this is not the time to go outside and have a smoke, go grab a drink or pick your nose. This is the record, understand please!

You of course provide your ‘Hot n Ready DJ Tips’ to fans, which is such a great resource in a world where people can get wrapped up in accusations of gatekeeping. Have you learnt any new ones from the past year that you’d want to add?

OO: We do the guides because we want to share information as much as we can. And because we only play records, over the past few years we’ve had to learn so much technical knowledge about setting up turntables, sound isolation and things like that. We’re still doing more work on guides that we want to put out, but specifically one about things like isolation for booths, isolation for records, stage setups for festivals – a macro guide about taking care of these things. We’ve finally found some ways that really work and we know a lot of DJs that started on records who just stopped playing them because they aren’t set up for them anymore. We have a solution because we do this 80, 90 times a year.

ED: It’ll be our soundcheck for a proper vinyl setup, because that’s the area where our guide almost stops. We would like to do more on very specific topics that we’ve learned through experience and through working with professionals. We work with a tour production manager because it’s incredibly hard to get it right on big stages and we need certain monitoring to really be able to mix in the technique we use. So we want to share all that knowledge because so many DJs feel discouraged from playing vinyl.

Do you think it’s improved at all? Vinyl setups have been a talking point for a while and it seems like there are more vinyl DJs on the scene than say, six or seven years ago.

OO: I don’t know. I do know that the people we work with want to get it right. That’s awesome. And we’ve been playing with artists like DJ Sweet6teen who plays almost all records. So it’s cool, and some of the bookers are like: “Let’s pair them together, because Eris and Maya have got a good vinyl setup and will work our people ahead of time to make sure that it’s all good and we’ve got this other DJ that we really like who is also going to be playing all vinyl and would benefit from all of them having good setups.

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I feel like there’s been an urge to embrace more rock sounds in your music, ‘Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II – Rock The House’ is perhaps the most obvious example – what’s the thinking behind it?

ED: Well, she and I would get so excited by these tracks, so it’s always been there. There’s this kind of cliché that DJs would be like: “I don’t want to hear guitars in dance music – that’s cheesy.” But Maya and I love big beat and all that kind of stuff. We like rock music, and we just like all music. We like to sample and play old records, we like strange combinations, surrealist ideas of uncanniness and things like that – it’s kind of psychedelic to have some of these rock influences.

OO: It’s definitely an interest in having more psychedelic aspects to the sets. Plus big beat has rock ‘n’ roll all over it, same with Florida breaks.

ED: She and I would be sweating up there, everyone’s so physical and interacting, and there are moments when it just feels right. There was this moment in Finland when the sound engineer started headbanging to this progressive house track and I did it too – it was really fun because it was genuine and we were all letting go. The dance music scene is very adult [now], when I came into it, the scene was very young. When I say adult, I mean very sophisticated in certain ways, and Maya and I like to embrace a certain joyousness and evoke strange archetypes. So especially as American DJs, going to kick out the jams feels like the kind of spirit that we try to transmit.

OO: When we play records, we like to see it as a guitar. We don’t like it to be covered up – we like people to be able to see what we are doing, and we do a lot of scratching and overdubbing, and working the mixer. I’ve been performing music since I was a teenager and there’s an act of our body that we put into what we do. It’s not just dancing, we like to be very physical while we play, so I think that’s kind of rock ‘n’ roll.

Do you think the sound feels particularly relevant right now, given the world that we live in?

ED: I don’t know, that’s so interesting. I always feel like those kinds of thoughts come after the impulse of choosing the records. But I have thought: “Is the world ready for big beat again?” Some records really work and others don’t, and some have really been able to stand the test of time. But I don’t really know anyone else doing it the way that we are.

OO: I feel like we have a pocket of what we really like and what we like to present. Also, I have one record bag that I bring on tour with me, so it’s not like I can totally change up what’s in there for every single set. We pull from this same thing, so I don’t know if that goes with the trends, but I do know that there’s always a kind of counter reaction to what’s going on. But that’s also very splintered – there’s so much hard and fast techno now but there’s a lot of people we know that love playing slower and want to play at 100 BPM instead of 140 BPM. Then there’s raves where 400 kids are showing up and they are playing hardstyle and gabber, and everyone’s playing 45-minute sets. I call it the clubber time continuum – when I was at high school I loved drum ‘n’ bass and hardstyle and gabber and now I don’t play that quite as much. Everyone enters in a different space and comes out in a different area, and the trends of what’s going on are always mish-mashed.

ED: But we just try to be in our own space and offer our own thing. People sometimes focus too much on the sound that’s happening. Like: “Oh, everyone wants it fast, and everyone’s just in the hardstyle,” but maybe everyone’s kind of hyperbolic in this situation. Yeah, a lot of people are sure that’s the sound of the moment, but there are plenty of people who want to go rock out to house. There’s plenty of DJs with all these quirky sounds – when you look at the T4T LUV NRG label there’s so many different people and sounds that are associated with us loosely, and we like and respect.

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You’ve both been in and around music for a long time and raved through different times – some good, some tougher – and of course this year has been tough. The far right is riding a crest across the world, transphobia is becoming increasingly scary – as people who have been doing this for a while, where do you feel like dance music and your roles as DJs fit into this?

ED: That’s a really interesting question. I think a lot of people are struggling with it, and we see that with ourselves and our peers. We definitely believe that there is a politics to the dancefloor, but there is also a transcendence to the dancefloor – an experience that’s outside of cultural considerations. We want people to both feel unity around certain ideas and ideals, but also just to have spaces to non-judgementally explore. I mean, we’re both so upset by what’s happening in the world, and you can think: “What’s the point of music in a time like this?” But I quickly pivot from that – music is really important for people, and it’s a really necessary thing right now, but it’s not sufficient in making things better in the world.

OO: Everyone’s idea of the club is different. For us, it’s not about utopia, and it’s not about escapism. For some people it is, but for us, we view it as about embodiment, presenting art and trying to have experiences together. That can be good and bad when it comes to processing what’s going on in the world. So, we’re not playing records, like: “Positive vibes only!” The music that I make and the music we present is very autobiographical – it’s what we’re going through and presenting things that we hope to see in the future, and to hopefully at times address how things are feeling in the moment. I find right now, when I feel disconnected and upset so much by what’s going on, that what is important to me is language around embodiment, being who you are, being what you want to see in the world and trying to push that forward and help others to feel the same way. There’s so much around us telling us not to be who we need to be.

I used to think that partying can save the world, but there are dark sides to it too.

OO: During dark times I think it’s important to be creating art, even when it’s a really tough space to be doing that. It can be important how you create context around the art that you’re presenting because you don’t want to be flippant about what people are going through, but I don’t think that means people should stop making art. If you feel the impulse to be creating during these really dark and tough times, go for it. And if you don’t want to engage with any of this, that’s fine too.

ED: Clubs are more than just spaces for entertainment. And even then, more than spaces for transcendence, or spiritual things or sexual things – they’re about making friends and finding people that share your values, but also being around people who are different to you.

What does 2025 hold for the motherbeat?

ED: We have big plans, but I can’t tell you.

OO: Put it this way, in 2025 Eris and I are taking time off touring to work on music, both together and separately. We haven’t had a ton of time to do that with our busy schedules. It’s been five years since my last album, and I love making albums. Eris’s came out three years ago. We just want to have more time to make music. Then we’ll be touring quite a bit and doing more soundsystem stuff.

ED: Neither of us [produce] that well on the road, because when we are out DJing we are 110% dedicated to it. We’re hitting shops, listening to records at the hotel, trying to learn arrangements and really internalise stuff, then we’re just trying to take care of ourselves and get to our next event.

Tell us about your mix

ED: We wanted to do a proper, 128 BPM house mix. Maya and I’s very ecstatic, house energy mix. It’s going to be just over an hour, because we want it to be in that radiant space for the entire time and play some of our older favourites, as well as newer favourites from our record bag over this past year. We’re not like ‘track of the week’ DJs, when we love something, it’s getting played over the span of a few years, sometimes even 10 years.

OO: Yeah, it’s some of my favourite records and some of Eris’s favourites. We’ve recorded it in my studio. On Technics SL-1200 M5Gs, +/-16 pitch digital pitch control so it’s very tightly calibrated – they’re our favourite turntables and I bought them for myself for Christmas two years ago.

t4tluvnrg.com

Isaac Muk is a freelance writer, follow him on Bluesky

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