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Eris Drew and Maya Bouldry-Morrison (aka Octo Octa) live in a log cabin in rural New Hampshire, which seems a little strange at first—so far removed from the dance music touring circuit—but it also makes a lot of sense. Radical, queer, and believers in a psychedelics-fueled liberation theology based around the Motherbeat, the long-term couple are actually so New Hampshire. The cabin, where they’ve lived since the pandemic, is the focal point of their artistic lives, where they keep a gigantic sound system they’ve used to throw their own festival in Vermont, and the hallowed turntables that they lug around to gigs across North America.
To make Alchemical Sisters, their first collaborative full-length, Drew and Bouldry-Morrison transformed the bedroom of their cabin into a hermetically sealed studio. They slept on the floor and took mushrooms for extended periods of time while weaving together an LP made from psych-folk instruments (dulcimer, anyone?), synths, and samples taken from their archive of vintage dance music. The result is a maximalist record that captures the wide-eyed, everything-at-once optimism of ’90s big beat. Those original records, by artists like the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim, evoke a time when the distance between the dancefloor and regular life dissolved, and the tracks—dance music made not for function, but for fun, anytime—swelled with the pomp and excess of rock and hip-hop.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The new record is the closest that the two have come to infusing their distinctive DJing style into their original productions. This turn to larger-than-life sounds shouldn’t be all that surprising: In their DJ sets together, they play raucous, often older records built on heady climaxes, wailing vocals, and thrashing drum beats. In 2024, Drew even released a rock-themed mixtape where she blazed through tracks by Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. Alchemical Sisters has the same brash bullheadedness from the get-go: “This Is How It Should Be Done” bursts out of the gate with a funky breakbeat and staccato vocal sample before a surging acid line upends everything, the drums change tack, and a guitar swoops in. It’s hard to tell what’s a sample and what’s original, which is probably the point.
Alchemical Sisters is a four-dimensional record where the past endlessly loops back on itself. The two musicians are so good at aping the sounds they were raised on that originality and reference become one and the same. Is that a sample of Spiritualized’s “I Think I’m in Love,” swooning and swooping across “Anytime Sisters?” I think it is—but does it matter? Did they sample those vinyl scratches that push “Anytime Sisters” over the edge, like an overexcited Crystal Method song, or record them in their studio? The expansive feeling also comes from the way the duo wrote and recorded these tracks. The drums are constantly switching, the gait galloping one way and then swerving back again, as if the music could go anywhere. That dynamism is the reason the choppy, funky “Double Acid” channels the clammy hedonism of late-’80s acid house into something that feels ritualistic: The drums occasionally feel played by hands, and you can almost see the spray of sweat bouncing off the skins.
The album sounds rich and hi-def—not vintage in the fashion of worn-out records, but vintage in the way that mid-’90s electronica still sounds like the future, the way that skeins of synth land in jagged thunderbolts across the stereo field in “Ray of Light.” To hear the duo tell it, this is because they brought their finished recordings to Detroit DJ and producer BMG, who used a huge mixing console, complete with analog tube amps, to mix it down—there’s that big rock vision again. The music sounds appropriately warm and alive. The almost Krautrocky synths on the slow-grooving, almost naively happy “Did You Know” have a whiff of the ’70s, while the hip-hop-leaning “One 2 One 2 Three Four” has the in-the-room physical largesse of early ’80s electro, the kind that was built on the foundations of Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra. And “We’ve Seen Great Power” taps into the vibrant psychedelia of the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds,” complete with opening monologue, built around a wailing harmonica sample that is stretched, pulled, and broken apart like dough, with plenty of sound effects and “Think” breaks to dial up the kitsch. Like “When the Levee Breaks,” the Led Zeppelin track that has given oomph to so many electronic records over the years, it’s a storm surge of sound, oppressively overheated and thickening the air around it with tension.
Still, the best track on Alchemical Sisters is the one that feels the least referential. “Song for New Hampshire” glows with familial warmth, the kind of contentment that Drew and Bouldry-Morrison exude in public. Above all, their life as far as we can see it in interviews and on social media seems idyllic, almost magical: two people and their chosen family continually (re)finding themselves in an enchanted forest. The song sounds the part, with synths that pulsate and groan like sitars, or hum like bagpipes, with a hippy-dippy bent that recalls Banco De Gaia, a hokey-but-secretly-great progressive house duo probably best remembered for closing out the first disc of Northern Exposure.
There’s something a little mawkish about “Song for New Hampshire,” but the song is so earnest that you can’t help but root for it. It’s a distillation of all the things that go into making Drew and Bouldry-Morrison a force for good on the global dance-music stage. Decades of musical blood, sweat, and tears have culminated in this record, like a cosmic outpouring of everything they’ve experienced along the way, rethought and repackaged for everyone else to enjoy. In locking themselves in their studio to create Alchemical Sisters, they’ve accomplished what their name promises: making gold out of the stuff of life.
