This interview almost didn't happen, by which I mean that I almost didn't strike up a conversation with Octo Octa after seeing her in a pizza shop and ask if we could do an interview later on. A neat thing about festivals, which actually happens almost as much as marketing materials would have you believe, is the unplanned discovery of new acts in the downtime between the ones you're there for. The young lord Mitch Hatch had just sold me on catching Octo Octa's set a little later on when she walked into Pie Pushers and sat down right beside us.

[REDACTED], the conversation went, and a time was set. I'd like to pretend that it was only then that I discovered that half an hour of frantic googling and a 45-minute live set was enough preparation to do a decent interview, but that's unfortunately been my M.O. since the start.

This is the third of four interviews that I conducted at this year's Moogfest in Durham, NC. If you read any of it, read the last few questions, where I'm set extremely straight on the question of intertwining artists' work and identities.

The various genres of electronic music are so tightly defined that it seems there’s a relatively narrow palette with which you can express emotion, especially working without vocals. Looking at your song titles, however, that’s something that you’re obviously in pursuit of.

It’s super hard to do with instrumental music; that’s why I’ll try and lean on that secondary medium of track titles. But for the most part, it’s just having feelings while making the thing. I don’t really approach the track like oh, I need a heavy banger right now so much as sitting down, feeling around and seeing what’s happening. Trying to process the day and seeing what comes out. I definitely don’t know how to do the whole this really needs this one chord to convey this deep sadness that I have right now – it just doesn’t happen that way. But I can listen back and remember why I was feeling that certain way on that day. A lot of that still ends up being just for myself, though, so I’ll use the track titles to convey extra meaning if I feel like it’s not really there from the music alone.

Is that sort of certainty necessarily apparent during the track’s creation, or do some things live for months as April 29th beat sketch or whatever and only have gain significance later on?

That definitely happens sometimes – it goes, like, half and half. Half the stuff is just a working title, then the other half I’ll immediately know what’s up with the thing or why. It’s all over the place, really – I don’t have a particular studio regimen to sit down and work on stuff. Sometimes I’ll sit down and write four tracks in a week, or sometimes I’ll go three weeks making barely anything.

Going back to being able to pull the right chord out of a hat, it seems like it’d be so easy to overdo – when you start working with classically sad or melancholy chords things can become really maudlin really quickly.

Yeah, sure. But also, being self-taught it’s all by ear. I can look at a piano after doing this for fucking fifteen years and think I know how to make this make certain sounds, but I’m never really sitting down and inserting this or that specific chord. I don’t really have that vocabulary to understand what I’m doing, so it’s mostly just chasing a deep feeling and hoping that it translates.

I’ve always been curious about the notion of albums in electronic music – in both form and function, the sound has been totally dictated by the club environment. How do you go about working towards an album?

So I’ve only done two album-albums. I think on Discogs you can find, like, a tape compiling some extra material from two EPs that I sold as tour merch a while back. It took me a long time to get the first album done, and then the second was also like four years. I like albums because it gives you a chance to work with a narrative, or have a bunch of tracks that have a flow to them vs. a 12 where it can just be a collection of four tracks that you wrote around the same time. I want albums to have flow, and it took me a long time to write another one because there was no point where I felt like the tracks that I was writing were coming together in any way. It’s a nice chance to have a narrative, as opposed to those albums where it’s three A-sides from a couple years prior and then some random ambient pieces in between – you listen and you go I don’t understand why this starts here or ends there. You have an ambient intro and an ambient outro trying to create some extra flow, but it’ll always sound like a collection of tracks.

Is the idea of an album’s flow similar to how you think about constructing a live mix?

I write really slowly. Even though I put out a bunch of stuff, I’m still rather slow at getting sets together. I’ll have a four month stretch during which I’ll write four demos that I’m happy with, but which I don’t understand the relationship between them other than them having been written around the same time. But then with the last album, I had six tracks together that I felt like actually all worked together. I was also doing lots of tracks based on coming out and recent club experiences – when I’d listen to my demos together, they all actually had a feel to them.

I guess jazz is the classic example of albums that are just however many tracks that might not share much more than a lineup of performers, whereas electronic music composition is such a mobile thing that you could easily lose any sort of thematic continuity. Does that play into your relationship with your unreleased tracks at all? Do some gestate, or are you just waiting for the right time to release them?

Again, writing really slowly I don’t necessarily have that much extra stuff. I always have a handful of unreleased stuff, but when I’m doing live sets now I’m doing them half-improvised, which is really nice – it gives you a reason to come see me more than once every year. After doing this for a while, you can come in with skeletons of a bunch of stuff and then see what the vibe in the room is, how you feel like starting, and so on.

Is that an element of preparing for a set? Making sure that you have your emotional bases covered in case the crowd is feeling this or that way?

I have enough of a taste range with what I DJ that I can move around when things aren’t working. I really, really love garage vocal house – I play a lot of it – but sometimes I’ll do like five of those tracks in a row and see people kind of flagging from it. But also, you come with your record bag or your USBs – you’ve already got a range of stuff on there by default. But I never come in thinking that I have to play these five tracks tonight or anything.

Electronic music’s maybe the last genre to be almost fully formed prior to the internet; even though it’s so integrated now, there are still remnants of that regionalism. Was there a particular scene or sound that sparked your interest as a child?

Yeah, sure. My dad had some random electronic albums around the house that I really liked as a kid. I played lots of video games and really loved the soundtracks to those. I’d download the .MIDIs and stuff like that just to listen to on Winamp or whatever. But the first truly regional musical idea or genre that I listened to was drum ‘n’ bass and jungle – very much products of the UK that had a sense of that place before being spun out into whatever else. I grew up in New Hampshire, and the scene there is punk bands and funk bands; there’s no electronic music there. So even then it was always through the internet that I was able to find out about a far greater range of things – what makes Detroit different from Chicago, so on. They’re labels used by people making music all around the world now, but at one point they had very serious, specific meanings.

Was drum 'n' bass considered cool at the time, or were you particularly drawn to it for some reason?

Absolutely not. I was super duper alone being interested in this music. I only had a handful of friends who were in the types of bands that I mentioned, who I’d go and see. Then I had like two other friends that’d say oh, check out this Boards of Canada CD or something like that, which was a really nice introduction to electronic music that immediately locked into my brain. Even younger than that, I’d buy Beck cds or the Beastie Boys, things that were produced more than made from organic elements. It was always something that I really enjoyed. So I got into that, and then I was listening to internet radio and saw a station called drum ‘n’ bass radio. I thought, well, hey, I like drums and I like bass, let’s see what this is. I click on it and it just immediately hits me – my brain lights on fire, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. We’d just gotten the internet, and that was the first thing I did on it.

I’ve had a hard time figuring out if I dig regionalism or not – on the one hand, it’s impossible to say that people having access to musical cultures they weren’t born into is a bad thing; on the other, seeing the heritage of things like food that resist digitization is pretty neat. In terms of discovery, where do you fall while DJing: are you open with track IDs or is that for you to know?

If someone comes and asks me for a record, I’ll always show them. I don’t really love the idea of trainspotting – if you’re at the club, are you there to listen and dance or what? I guess I get the idea of going to try and discover new things, but when someone’s doing it too much you can’t help but wonder whether they’re enjoying themselves at all. It seems like you’re doing too much to try and educate yourself rather than getting the feeling of being in the moment and dancing to this music right now. So I don’t care, really [laughs]. The only thing I don’t like is requests for stuff while someone’s playing – I want you to play this thing that’s totally different from what you’re playing right now. Why are you even here? Like, go home and listen to Spotify. If you’re coming to see a DJ, the whole thing is enjoying what they’re going to throw at you.

That’s an interesting idea – paying too close attention to what’s being played, down to the label that it’s out on, kind of downplays the DJ’s function as anything but a playlist.

Right, plus in chasing that you might be distracting the DJ even further from setting up whatever they’re trying to do next. Sometimes you’ll cue up in five seconds and have a few minutes to chill, but it can get down to the wire.

It’s funny that the perpetrators are presumably huge electronic music nerds, since the whole behavior has to be a hangover from seeing DJing as entirely distinct from performance, musical or otherwise.

I understand how people look at DJs as someone there to provide entertainment rather than a main event that you might be specifically going to see, but it still drives me crazy sometimes. It’s entertainment, but it’s also someone performing for you even if they’re using a pre-made, built-in setup in a bar.

I’ve always imagined that to be part of why the whole dubplate culture emerged, artists feeling the need to justify being treated as touring musicians by having songs known to be available only during their sets. What form does your touring usually take at this point?

It’s a lot of one-off, fly to a coast and do a handful of shows and fly back. It’s a split between live sets and DJing, each of which necessitate bringing along different stuff. There’s enough money in clubs that as a DJ the fees are enough that you can fly in, do a round trip, and still have enough cash to live. With a band of five people, the math gets a lot harder. The only thing that I do consistently in the States is a monthly party that I do in Brooklyn with a friend. Everything else is all up in the air, booking a couple months in advance and hoping to see more stuff roll in.

At this point, how do you think about the function of an album? It doesn’t seem like they’re making money for anybody involved.

I really haven’t been paid off a record in like three years. Now, it’s essentially just promotion – I’m still here, I’m still around, I’m still making stuff. It’s really just interest generation vs. income generation. It’s not like you even make more money off of one that you put time and effort into, but people are still more interested in… that’s too broad a statement, I’m not sure if other people feel that way. This is still an artform, and people are still trying to make music that can carry statements or ideas with it. The album is still a powerful thing, even if people are barely going to engage with it in that way anymore. People are going to go on Spotify and listen to one or two tracks, not the entire thing through. But it’s still personally satisfying to finish an entire thing that has a narrative and flow to it – this is my work, this is my artform. As much as it’s also my job now, to go and tour and do stuff, it’s still my main way of expressing myself.

Are there specific entry points through which you’ve found that most people are being introduced to your music?

I don’t listen to much streaming stuff at all, so singles aren’t really too important to me – I still like going to record stores, grabbing a pile of stuff, and going through it. As far as my fans, it’s all over the place. I still have a lot of people that will come up to me and talk about that first EP that I did in 2011, you know, oh, I really love that record. Which is cool, but we’re talking six years later. Partially, you really want them to be all about the new thing that you’re doing, but if it’s been six years and they’re still interested in what you’re doing, that means they’re seeing you as more than any single track. But that first record’s still the one that I hear about the most.

Talking about performance as self-expression, what form does a gratifying audience response take for you?

Just people dancing [laughs]. I’ve done a lot of different types of performance over the years – some weird noise stuff, weird band stuff where it’s a lot of people standing around. I did a lot of IDM for a while, which was a lot of chin-scratching more than anything else. Which is fine. But now, since I do mostly house and techno, the response I need is that when this is happening, you’re dancing. I don’t need hoots and hollers, I just want people to be moving so that I can check in and know that people are still enjoying themselves. When a bunch of people are just standing there, that’s the absolute weirdest response as a DJ. There are a ton of people here, none of them are moving, but they’re not leaving either. Are they enjoying this right now?

Looking through your previous interviews, it seems like the headlines are always in the format Interview with trans electronic musician Octo Octa, Octo Octa on coming out, and maybe we’ll talk about her music as well. Did you want your identity to be as wrapped up in your music as it tends to be in the press?

Right, I’ve been talking about it recently. It’s an inescapable part of what I’m doing right now, and a part of it now is figuring out if you’re getting booked because people like your music or just because you’re a transperson. Having that tag on top of everything doesn’t bother me, because I was releasing a lot of music before then, touring consistently, and now afterwards I don’t mind it because there aren’t a ton of openly trans producers out there doing stuff. So anytime I see anyone else that is trans that is putting out music, I like to hear what they’re doing. I’ll typically identify a lot more with what they’re putting out. I talk about DJ Sprinkles way too much, but Midtown 120 Blues is an album with a really heavy trans narrative on top of it. I really appreciated when I heard it, and before coming out I really appreciated being able to listen to music from somebody who was very openly like this is me, this is what’s happening, I’m including this in the stuff I’m doing right now. I don’t mind having that tag because I don’t think that my music is nearly as important as other peoples’, but if someone else gets into what I’m doing just because of that and is able to pull out any of those same feelings or reactions that I had from other people that were out, that’s really important to me. I don’t mind talking about it all the time right now because if there’s anyone else out there like I was a few years ago, I want to be here and available to them.

Especially talking about being trans in terms of house music, there aren’t articles being written like oh, look at all these trans musicians doing house music right now. There’s no genre twist for electronic music based just on being queer, which is what you see with rap and punk bands and stuff. But there are absolutely people out there who are hungry for a narrative and waiting to see themselves represented in the music that they’re consuming.