I first heard of valyri through the canadian label New Motion back in 2018, with a series of ambient vignettes on their dual release Saturnfall and Surreality. As i started to look deeper into their discography, i instantly noticed their love for purple and blue hues, gently textured ambient pieces and soothing sounds. Very soft aesthetic, sounds and concepts. As time progressed, and as they started collaborating more closely with my good friend Octa, their sound changed drastically. Comparing a track from, say, their album Phases (on Hairs aBlazin') with something more recent, like what i consider to be their magnum opus, Pronouns In Bio (on Euphonium Records), the Octa influence can certainly be heard, seen and felt. There's a casual aspect to their new material that makes everything feel more personal, almost as if we're looking at an album in the process of being made. No longer vague vignettes of moments passed and ideas felt, but rather explorations in presence, in immediacy. This is, in my opinion, a staple of Octa's work that certainly bled into valyri's production style. As they once said on their album Traffic Sirens & Stagnant++ Divinity (on Pal Direct): "Just put it out into the wild. Finishing is having it out, not having it be perfect". A quote that to this day is one of the most inspiring things i've ever heard. Octa is famous (or for some, infamous) for having, last time it was checked, over 300 albums under many, many names. They might as well be the artist with the biggest amount of pseudonyms ever, and by now they've probably reached the 500 album mark, if not more. This desire for immediacy has bled into the way i produce some of my music, and it's a practice/concept that many artists find liberating and in some cases addicting, as can be clearly be seen by the wide array of musicians on their biggest and most active project to date, the label/collective 7Form, which i had the pleasure to administrate, along with some other very talented individuals.
valyri and Octa are constantly redefining what collaboration means, almost becoming one single entity. And this is why i pitched this idea to them, this two-way interview. Their chemistry in conversation is absolutely mesmerising to experience, and i wanted to have that somehow archived somewhere for everyone to see. It is a treat for sure.
valyri's studio on the left, Octa's on the right.
valyri: Hiya, Octa! It's me, valyri!
Octa: Octal. Hello, hello. How are you doing this fine evening? It's not quite evening over in EST, and it's the dead of night here, so let's settle for evening for now. It'll just work here because time zones aren't fucking real.
valyri: I'm pretty good, yes, time zones. They are pretty crazy. It's like the uh, the Negativland song. You know. "Time Zones". By Negativland.
Octa: The USSR has 11 time zones. Absolute heresy.
valyri: Eleven.
Octa: Modern Day Russia has about the same amount of time zones, maybe a few have been eliminated. We're perpetually on summer time, however. So it's more eleven timezones and eleven shadow versions that are on winter time.
valyri: Never caught me as a summery sort of place in any form.
Octa: It's just a formality. You use Daylight Savings and shit over there. We're just perpetually on Daylight Savings because the Sun hates us and doesn't give us nearly enough. The sun sets at 4PM here, so if I wake up at 1PM, I barely have any time to live out the day. Time constrictions are a bitch. Speaking of time constrictions and formalities, let's get those out of the way.
valyri: That was a great segue, Octa!
Octa: Thank you, anyway. The introductions, yes, yes, hello. I am Octa Mathilde Möbius Sheffner. Mathilde optional, umlaut is not optional. I'm a Russian experimental artist or something of that sort whose work covers an absurd amount of ground and an absurd amount of time. By the way, regretfully so: yes, it is pronounced Mewbius. I am cursed to sound like a cat for the rest of my lifetime. My work dabbles in shit that pisses most people off. You know, like going back to rough drafts and seeing that they're unfinished and going "yeurgh, that sure sounds lame, what was I thinking?". In my case, I dig those up and sort them out into newer, remade things.
valyri: Can't make a forest without Stems!
Octa: Making a forest with all the stems I can get is my present focus, although the validity of this statement slips day by day. Well, it sure as hell doesn't slip as far as my sample sources go. Anything that I can dig up gets swallowed by the Ableton void, it shatters like cheap glass, if you will.
valyri: Most people can't make a forest at all, but that just goes to show you how forward-thinking you tend to be.
Octa: Speaking of shatter... I'll hand the introduction reins to you for now.
valyri: Yes! Hello! I am Valyri Sheffner Harris, middle and last names taken from my spices. That's plural for spouse. I do a lot of... content. I make things. I spend hours a day just making things, with no intention of being anything in particular. One of my favorite things to do is to resample dance music to turn it into a collage of noise. I use the term "shattertrance" for this work. Turning shitty EDM into a big piece of glass, smashing it with a hammer, dying each piece a different color, and making a big stained glass mosaic from the result. Of course that's not all I do, it's just a majority of what I publish as of late!
Octa: It's certainly their most monumental and most easily recognizable work too. It's eye-catching and it's colorful and you can't escape it even if it makes you sick with how extravagant it is.
valyri: It's the kind of intense that makes you afraid to turn it off before it ends! But that may be the ear fatigue.
Octa: The ear fatigue is a part of the experience after all, the firm and violent ear-shattering. Listening to the first installment of the Mosaic diptych is the best headache I've ever had. Seriously, that album is sickening. Picked at my earwax like no tomorrow with how impenetrably dense some chunks were.
valyri: Mosaic was originally going to be twice as long, but. Well. I decided to acknowledge that listening to that sort of work for, oh, 3 hours straight, might not be the best, so I split it into two parts, the second of which should release... some time soon?
Octa: We were thinking summertime for that. The release of the second installment will deep fry anyone upon impact. It'll make their tired, sunburnt world even more tired and end them. Something distinctly overpowering in how apocalyptic it is. That's a big part of how I art direct your covers and your music videos. Violent Baroque, Scrapyard Baroque. You know, those fancy regal residences where there's gold-plated walls everywhere for no fucking reason other than traditional masculinity— "traditional masculinity" meaning "two really rich guys making bigger and bigger houses for themselves to out-flex each other". The baroque period was known for being utterly excessive and imposing. You could feel the wealth in each and every decoration in those buildings. "Scrapyard baroque" is baroque for the digital age, internet detritus baroque.
valyri: James Ferraro.
Octa: Where there is so many unrelated things colliding, artifacted or not, that the overall construction / overall mosaic creates something beautiful but grotesque. Ferraro is absolutely a great example of this too. His integration of corporate design elements such as QR codes and twisting them and making them feel like mythical beings in their own right is probably some of the most forward-thinking conceptual shit this century so far. The taking of trash and dissonance and making the dissonance feel far more majestic than anything perfect harmony can offer you.
valyri: My work sounds nothing like his, but it conceptually has a lot in common, though from a different perspective I think.
Octa: Ferraro's free association lyrics and visceral but vivid storytelling definitely parallels the anguished screams and rambling in yours, where the actual content doesn't matter and acts as an expression of the most simple, most easily recognizable identifiers of whatever you want to convey.
valyri: The dissonance can have an addictive nature. I try to capture that in my work. We should interview him next.
Octa: A QR code leads you to somewhere. You scan it and you get something. A scream is terrifying, pained intonation is pained. Also, god, I wish. The scrapyard piling of simple symbols and simple identifiers becomes addictive due to it starting to make perfect sense later. (eutopia hint given) Your all-time favorite album is a great example of that, isn't it? You should definitely mention it.
valyri: I was planning on mentioning it, yes! To say it's my favorite piece of audio of all time would be incorrect, as that would go to Robert Ashley's "Perfect Lives", however. That is an opera, not an album. My favorite ALBUM specifically, is a release called "Eutopia", by HikkieP, or sometimes distributed as "Tomooki Otaka". On a whim, you found it on YouTube and linked it to me, the first time I heard it I got more of a Kenji Siratori vibe, like, just random sounds collaged together, it felt completely random. I AM a fan of random, but, on the second listen, I realized it's really more of a Pop album. It's extremely dense and chaotic, but every single element of it feels more and more purposeful every time I listen to it. It feels like an encapsulation of... the overwhelmingness of being alone. Loneliness can be sad, but it can also cause a completely manic state, where your mind screams and screams at you but you find that you're unable to move or do the things you know you need to be doing. Executive dysfunction, etcetera. But it encapsulates it in a completely fucking apocalyptic way. I absolutely constantly strive for that in my work.
Octa: It's a pop record rising out of the ghost of pop, the digested and processed scraps of pop music and pop culture that soon become an esoteric stew, an entire world of obsession and distortion. A pop album informed by the fact that pop culture is chewed up and celebrities are targeted. Pop music can disappear at any moment if the people making it are deemed irrelevant or cast out as the "other". It's an overwhelming process to keep up with, and more often than not, how 'that world' moves feels more like a cruel joke than anything. It's a world that's easy to get lost in, but it's a world that will drain you and a world that can both benefit you and hurt you. The consumption of media comes with the price of not slipping away from reality. Eutopia is the logical extreme of reality and the brain's feedback from consuming media merging and creating an incomprehensible monolith. A world that's both content with itself and a world that's completely at war at itself. A world that's both accepted and rejected simply by existing.
valyri: It feels like a perfect piece of media in that way. Like... Obviously, something like perfection is totally subjective, but with that in mind, as long as something can be "the best thing" to one person, that thing is perfect. Otherwise the only "perfect" album would be what has sold the most copies. With that being the case, you could argue that both of us have made perfect albums, ourselves.
Octa: The subjectivity of art is what keeps it alive. As long as someone can decide that some bullshit that appeals to them specifically is the best thing ever, someone will inevitably come to agree and spread word of that album. An opinion is a virus. Language is a virus. Culture is a virus. I've made some albums I consider easily replayable and easily likable except for the part where I make a better record four days later. If culture is a virus, then it will mutate into new strains and it will infect those that have already outlived the original strain. Art is only good because you can fight over it, or rather, you can conduct a dialogue about it. You can assign it personal meanings and find some common ground and start giving into each other's biases because they just make way too much sense. Well-grounded arguments spread and well-grounded arguments give way to more examples of the exact principles of that argument.
valyri: I can't remember who it was, but there was some famous musician who was asked what he thought his best work was, and he responded something like, "Well, whatever I come out with next. Then once that's out, it'll be the one after that. That's kinda the entire point."
Octa: Self-improvement is an eternal cycle that comes naturally. You begin rejecting what you had made or rather viewing it as incomplete for a variety of reasons, including detachment from the person you were when you made it.
valyri: can't help but feel a little bit irritated when people come to me asking questions about my older work, while complaining about anything and everything I've done since moving out of Kansas.
Octa: By that logic, my favorite album of all time would be The Life of Pablo by Kanye West. The concept of 'WHICH//ONE' will eternally resonate with me. The most notable Pablos referred to in the album title are Pablo Piccaso and Pablo Escobar, as well as Saint Paul. To quote No More Parties in LA: "I feel like Pablo when I'm working on my shoes, I feel like Pablo when I see me on the news, I feel like Pablo when I'm working on my house, tell 'em party is here, we don't need to go out". The album cover containing an Instagram model and then a picture of the wedding of Kanye's parents distinctly divides the album into the celebratory hedonism of being a celebrity and the personal struggles of maintaining genuine human connections in the face of your environment becoming vapid. The music you made in Kansas was boring, let's be real. Some of it was good, sure. But it's music from a life you don't live anywhere. A life that nearly killed you. A life that was infested by shit people. Music that was made as an escape and sometimes just worsened your depression when you felt it was unambitious. Music that was comforting in the moment but no longer works for who you are now.
valyri: Without the trauma, I wouldn't be the artist or person I am today, even if I wouldn't wish the things I've dealt with onto anyone
Octa: People change, and so does art. People suffer, and art suffers with them. It helps them overcome suffering. Culture suffers with the people who have to perpetuate that culture and keep it evolving. The people who acknowledge this always make great leaps forward. They're inspired by the people that suffer with them, the people they love who assist with expanding their ideas, even if those ideas are objectively stupid and objectively ridiculous. Any vague concept that someone is really passionate in can far outgrow its initial state. It will mutate and it will give way to newer, bigger concepts and newer, bigger results. To me, finishing is just calling something done and getting it out. It has outlived its chronological usefulness. It was a reflection of one day, and with the experience of that day, the reflection of the day after it becomes even better. The passage I quoted from No More Parties in LA has stuck with me for that reason. "I feel like Pablo when I'm working on my house, tell 'em party is here, we don't need to go out" is in reference to Escobar getting locked up and then building his own prison for house arrest, which included a pool and all of his relatives could sneak in. So he just got shit-faced and threw parties in jail. The song is in itself about the turbulence of the LA lifestyle. A world that moves fast and a world that always changes but a world you really gotta sit the fuck back in and consider who you're dealing with and why you're doing the shit you do. You can obviously idealize the unreal. You can feel like Picasso innovating great things and you can feel like Escobar doing extravagant shit without consequence, but you'll always wind up a Saint Paul. Confessing before god and being thankful for the life you can lead, the life you were given.
valyri: Octa, you've always had a way with words far beyond anyone I've known. Which is crazy, because to my understanding, your English is entirely self-taught via the internet.
Octa: Sorry for wielding expertise at cultural osmosis, I don't do it intentionally! I think you've seen my vocabulary and articulation skills get even more incomprehensible most out of anyone else, though. So thanks for putting up with me.
valyri: I'm someone who has a tendency to space out a lot, typically when people talk to me while I'm struggling to pay attention, I get anxious about it, but when you communicate a lot at a time towards me, even when I can't process it all, I always find it comforting.
Octa: Words are worthless without someone to read them. I wouldn't be funneling text walls at you if I didn't know you'd gain your own understanding of it. Decisively more sparse in its wording, but decisively a different, equally valuable understanding.
valyri: I spend all day playing with sounds and equipment, improvising, making multiple significantly complex sounding tracks in the span of a few hours, but when someone asks how I'm doing I never know what to say, hahaha.
Octa: Whatever you're doing, you're doing you. Doing you and being confident in doing you is enough to make great art most of the time. That took me way too fucking long to learn. But I'm grateful I can be confident in saying it.
valyri: I'm grateful for you too, Octa! That aside, For me, sound connects to me more than language, it is a language, Even when I'm not recording, I almost always have some piece of gear on my desk that I fiddle with idly while multitasking on whatever else I'm busy with that day. That's one of my favorite parts about having a bunch of hardware- it doesn't lag up my computer to the point that I can't multitask, like a DAW would.
Octa: Everything is in itself a form of language. Everything communicates somehow. Body language is called that for a reason. If one sense is disabled, another finds a way to adapt. I've always greatly admired how much music you just manage to get done with your equipment. The Hydrasynth must be the best goddamn thing. And I'm very glad I can transpose that music to language: both verbal and visual. Art directing things for you has been the most inspired I've ever been. I love you so much. Thanks for being the only person who I can just do whatever for and it'll still make sense.
valyri: The Hydrasynth certainly is really somethin'. Paired with my Machinedrum, I could see myself doing a whole live tour with just those two. I feel grateful to have you for my art direction. Often times, for me, the hardest part of my work is... everything besides making it. I can make an album in 4 days, and then not release it for 5 months just because I can't come up with good track titles or cover art. Luckily, the latter isn't a problem anymore, since I can just get art from you! All in all, our work from the last 3 years really wouldn't exist without eachother, and I think the idea of this dual interview is really essential for an interview with either of us, because of the connection the two of us have as people and as artists. But hopefully the next interview can be a little bit longer, hahaha.
Octa: If artists are good at one thing, it's sticking together, even if one of them is atrociously talkative and another is really bad with words. Who knows, opposites do attract. And in art, opposites give way to greater things. All makes sense eventually. Maybe that 'eventually' is next time.
valyri: Harmonious dissonance.
valyri on twitter
Octa on twitter