Eris Drew and Octo Octa’s Alchemical Sisters Is a Double Album Built in a Cabin Retort

Alchemical Sisters is the self-titled debut double album from Maya Bouldry-Morrison, better known as Octo Octa, and Eris Drew. Across eight tracks, the pair work through late-’80s acid house, ’90s big beat, and electro, using hardware instruments rather than simply invoking those histories as reference points. The duo describe the record as “psychedelic chaos, acid rollers, and big beat,” animated by love, touch, rhythm, and spiritual fire.

The project has a longer backstory than its title suggests. Drew and Bouldry-Morrison are a queer couple who live in New Hampshire and have played back-to-back DJ sets for years. Drew calls their musical-spiritual framework The Motherbeat, a term that connects rave energy, disco house, broken beats, Miami bass, and turntable technique. Alchemical Sisters extends that practice into production. During the winter, they emptied the master bedroom of their forest cabin and sealed it as an alchemical retort, a hermetic vessel for a higher form. They slept on the studio floor for a year, working in white nightgowns under the spell of mushrooms, bringing dulcimers and ancestral instruments into contact with turntables, twentieth-century machines, and new technologies.

That process gives the album its specific gravity. It is not a nostalgia exercise or a DJ mix in album form, though both artists’ B2B sets inform its momentum. “This Is How It Should Be Done” opens with heat, and the record carries the sense of a private ritual made public. The context matters: Alchemical Sisters is a document of two established DJs