Octavius: "Of Mask & Money"

Octavius’s William Marshall makes music that’s as stone cold as the cast-in-ancient-marble moniker would suggest. This month’s Laws LP does itself mighty fine by vocalizing an association with Eno-era Bowie (side two of Low [1977] comes happily to mind), not to mention the obvious marks of others like Suicide, Tangerine Dream, and Cabaret Voltaire. Octavius has long been a known disciple of the ’90s trip-hop lineage as well, but he channels those tendencies into his own beckoning, menacing minimalism without giving in to grandiosity or anything beyond a certain open-space claustrophobia. It’s chilling fun. I think I’ve found my Halloween dance record.

The vocabulary of “Of Mask & Money” is a telling slice of Laws as a whole, though its pulsing beat stands as one of the heaviest and simplest among its peers. Rhythms coalesce out of distant machinery, all filtered through discordant veils of icicle synths and robotic chants. It’s like a revelatory moment of perfect, random celestial alignment in the midst of an auto shop in full swing, or the aleatoric song created by the clanking of chains hanging against the aluminum siding of a bass-banging party house at 2 AM.

Despite the professed inventory of convenient taste, and the relatively wide range of sounds contained by Laws, Octavius’s tunes sound unified and personal, like music from another dimension—a dimension where Brian Eno and Giorgio Moroder were once conjoined twins but had discovered an ancient Mayan secret to immortality and were allowed to somehow progress on their own indefinitely in a culture vacuum somewhere on an island in the North Atlantic. There’s lots of petty squabbling over simple decisions like where best to shop for outlandish sunglasses.