Octavia M Sheffner - Shivering

 Released: May 9

Despite being only six tracks, Octavia M Sheffner’s Shivering is well over an hour of chaotic lucidity. Every track has some many strange layers to it, each one have certain little pieces that feel incredibly familiar but leave you feeling very unsure if you truly recognize them. For example, there’s a recurring sound in the very first track “Erin’s & Aneris; in threadbare/threat-bare harmony” that I could swear is incredibly reminiscent of the initialization sound of the original PSX. But again, it feels as though it could just be a fever dream-type hallucination, obscured and slurred by the menagerie of other sounds that skitter about in the mix. A weird blend of hang-singing voices and repetitive rhythms that make it all too unreal. 

Basically the entire album follows this theme - a confusing and psychedelic blend of sounds that somehow maintains the reminiscence of a more or less regular song. It feels like an actual psychedelic trip, though I’m not sure if you would want to listen to it during such a trip as it might get over whelming. Additionally, everything is mixed together in a rather idiosyncratic way. There is no clean separation of all the parts and it often feels as though pieces are slurring into one another, with new sounds seeming to suddenly emerge out of others. There’s also a certain, not quite a haze, but something about the way all the sounds sit together. It almost as if all of these sounds are sitting together in a particularly small room with the speaker turn up beyond their capacity. It’s a very cool aesthetic that I can’t recall hearing anywhere else. 

The album is just such a weird vibe altogether. It feels so incredibly surrealistic as the sounds squish and expand and bounce around. For me, there were a few tracks that I enjoyed more than others, particularly the third track “Bye, Absolute Darkness - is a statement from which animosity arises.” The collection of sounds here is a bit more springy and strange but its this hazy little melody that comes in and out that feels maybe jazzy, maybe soft rock, maybe something else that kept catching my attention regardless of whatever else was going on. I enjoyed the whole album for pretty much the same reason - just these neat little clips of washed out sound that are blended together so surreally.