MORE EAZE & CLAIRE ROUSAY - No Floor

A deep bond unites Mari Maurice and Claire Rousay, a friendship born when both lived in Texas and were taking their first steps in the San Antonio music scene, one playing folk and country, the other active in noise-rock outfits. From those beginnings, within just a few years both have amply demonstrated a preference for different levels of sonic experimentation, and, driven by this shared sensibility, since 2020 they have repeatedly collaborated, exploring intersections between emo pop and sound collage, even brushing up against hyperpop drifts ("Never Stop Texting Me", 2022, Orange Milk).

Despite their current geographical distance, the two composers have found a way to renew their partnership, pushing it beyond already-trodden paths to venture into territory that is at once new and familiar. On "No Floor", the practice of collage and the attention to sound design remain, but what takes center stage above all are acoustic sounds, a legacy of their respective formative experiences. What disappears are the vocal parts – usually delivered with rigorous, even redundant, use of autotune – leaving definitive space for instrumental scores untethered from any possible song form.

The five tracks gathered on the record are as many contemplative itineraries guided by memories of evenings spent together in bars and clubs – in Maurice's words, "pillars of our dissoluteness" – steeped in the pastoral atmosphere of America's boundless landscapes. Rousay's guitar phrasings, at once fragile and insistent, partly pick up the pattern proposed on the rather flat "Sentiment", finding here full completeness in dialogue with Maurice's scores, the whole blended to perfection with found sounds and synthetic elements.

Tracks such as "Hopfields" and "Limelight, Illegally", with the dreamlike textures of pedal steel upfront, navigating a substrate of rarefied modulations, fit perfectly into contemporary American ambient music, tracing intense emotional trajectories, free to expand and change course.

What takes shape here is a journey free of rigid schemas, one that shifts fluidly between melodic construction – however unstable and fragmentary – and the possibilities offered by grafting in ambient resonances and glitch, holding together the angularity of "Kinda Tropical" and the sinuous dilution of "The Applebees Outside Kalamazoo, Michigan". The result is a highly evocative stream of consciousness, the high point of a fertile synergy that will surely yield new variations in the future.

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10/04/2025