Think of Texan artists claire rousay and Mari Maurice, aka more eaze, as a kind of social-media age Ween: their collaborations marked by marriages of lo-fi experimentalism and pop standards, irreverent humor, and—above all—restless genre-hopping. Their first album together, 2020’s if I don’t let myself be happy now then when, explored their experiences growing up in San Antonio and coming out as trans women through a shifting morass of field recordings. Extrapolating shared interests in found sound, pitch-shifted vocals, and Third Eye Blind, they conceptualized a genre they termed “emo ambient”: typified by a song like “Smaller Pools,” from 2021’s An Afternoon Whine, but morphing on tracks like Never Stop Texting Me highlight “Kyle” —with its crystalline synths and trap beats—into something closer to hyperpop.
Their latest collaboration, no floor, is another left turn: an instrumental record built around collaged electro-acoustic sounds that tells the story of their friendship through portraits of bars and venues—memorialized in the track titles—that they’ve visited. Combining elements of the pair’s joint and solo projects, these spacious, moving instrumentals are immediately identifiable as the work of rousay and Maurice. If you’re new to their music, this is a very pretty and distinctive ambient record, though the impressionistic style is likely to resonate most strongly with listeners who are already familiar (say, those who might be intrigued by the title’s possible relationship with “floor pt2” from Never Stop Texting Me, or “floor pt.3” from An Afternoon Whine). Once you picture the pair in action, no floor becomes a moving illustration of what it’s like for close friends to make very niche music in the vast expanse of America.
For the initiated, part of the joy in no floor is in identifying the two musicians’ artistic voices in conversation. In opener “Hopfields,” rousay’s brittle, ostinato guitar, which nods to last year’s album sentiment, is joined by Maurice’s yearning pedal steel, which recalls last year’s lacuna and parlor. While these songs aren’t presented as duets, “Hopfields” establishes a tender familiarity that runs through the record, even when Maurice’s violin and the pair’s joint electronics blur, as in the triumphant closing of “Lowcountry.”
Another mainstay of their work, found sound, takes a backseat here. rousay’s music has featured pencils, overheard conversation, and housekeys; Maurice once composed a piece “for an ensemble of amplified portal fans.” When field recordings make their way into no floor, live or synthesised sounds soon pull the focus. If those are footsteps near the top of “Kinda Tropical,” they quickly give way to ambient synths and guitar strums, while the overheard chatter that closes “Limelight, Illegally” is interrupted by a rough, synthetic lurch.
These shifting arrangements become a vivid form of storytelling, capable of evoking far-flung points on the emotional map. In “Limelight, Illegally,” the duo brings to life memories of gigging at hometown bar The Limelight while underage via a naïve, stumbling arrangement of guitar, violin, and an occasional pepper-mill grind of clangs, beeps, and squeals. When they venture far from home, to “The Applebees Outside Kalamazoo, Michigan,” the arrangement is wary and tense—as at the midpoint, where an eery sustained sound suddenly breaks with the creak of a guitar string. The influence of indie folk and country on the live instrumentation frame this album as distinctly American, while its airiness, spatial tricks—like the lurching strings in “Kinda Tropical”—and changing weather evoke travel across an enormous landscape.
no floor is not the best entry point to rousay and Maurice’s work. If this album is a kind of road trip documentary, I suggest getting better acquainted with the main characters first: Listening to sentiment, lacuna and parlor, and Never Stop Texting Me will make this newest album more rewarding. Once you get there, you’ll recognize no floor as an essential addition to the artists’ intertwined catalogs. It gives clarity to what’s so magnetic about their creative partnership: that, in the grand wilderness of America, these two unusual musicians found each other at all.
