From Marina Abramović to Pussy Riot: MRI's Purple Werewolf POPERA | Oktaves Podcast (Ep. 15)

In today's episode, performance artist MRI, also known as the Purple Werewolf, explains how a chance meeting with Pussy Riot's Diana Burkot turned into POPERA, a mixed genre pop opera he built without any formal music training.He walks through the meeting itself, what it was like to learn who he was actually collaborating with, and how the entire Purple Werewolf mythology, right down to the costume, arrived almost fully formed once the two of them started writing songs together.The story inside POPERA follows a werewolf who teaches Virginia Woolf to grow wings so she can fly out of a marriage, loses his memory to beings encountered deep in space, and searches the universe for a father who turns out to be a giant made of light. MRI traces that fairy tale directly back to his own life, from a childhood spent as a competitive gymnast and disco dancer in working class Denmark to years of durational performance training under artists like Marina Abramović, all without a single formal music lesson.Since 2011, MRI has also built a parallel body of work portraying his parents. A project called Rule Pink, performed alongside his mother across the 37 cities she has lived, became the documentary film My Mother's Pink. He is now developing a companion project about his father, who is from Niger and Fulani, and explains how that search shows up inside POPERA too.We also get into the object at the center of POPERA's opening number: a trench coat with 200 cassette tapes sewn inside it, holding a full album that nobody can hear unless the coat itself is destroyed. MRI explains what that piece says about ownership and access in the streaming era, and why he believes live performance is about to matter more, not less, as AI reshapes how music gets made.If you are trying to find your own voice inside a system that rewards speed and constant output, this conversation is for you. MRI's case for a private, unglamorous practice before anything reaches an audience is a useful counterweight to the pressure to share everything, right away.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Welcome to the Oktaves podcast🎙️ Talks with musicians! Where we uplift local musicians voices.This podcast is about chatting about and sharing with each other tips and tricks on how to succeed in the music industry as an independent musician, with an emphasis on branding and marketing, and overall management, whether your goal is to stay forever independent or get label-ready. We are very passionate about breaking the cycle of gatekeeping in the industry, so we strive towards bringing you conversations where these layers of the onion will be peeled one by one.We are also here to uplift and shed light on independent (or previously independent) musicians in our community, who are so kind to share their struggles, their wins, successes, their strategies, and advice or some secrets possibly to how they got there.🔗 Follow Oktaves:https://instagram.com/withoktaveshttps://facebook.com/oktaveshttps://tiktok.com/@withoktaves