Computer and recording works for girls might sound like a riff on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, but there’s a crucial distinction in the specification, “for girls.” Brooklyn-based multi-hyphenate Mari Maurice, a.k.a. more eaze, and Philadelphia electroacoustic explorer Kaho Matsui tap into some of the murky ambiguity of Richard D. James’ ambient landmark, but on their first collaborative album, they highlight the warmth of shared experience rather than the isolation of the lone tinkerer. Their respective relocations—Maurice from Austin, and Matsui from Portland—brought the two prolific artists together; improvising and recording in a cold New York City apartment, they melded their styles, following what Maurice described as the mutual desire “to see how our sounds could be sculpted around another artist’s melodic / compositional sensibilities.”
The two friends spent a series of frigid days stringing together experiments, overdubbing and blurring ideas like an emo-ambient Venn diagram. Maurice and Matsui play multiple roles, plucking and sliding across numerous guitars and ricocheting all kinds of electronic noises around the room. In a genre often characterized by solitude, they sound soothed and encouraged by each other’s company; for all the album’s abstracted drifting, the feel is cozy, the tones largely consonant.
The two artists have similarly eclectic discographies, and here, rather than opting for any particular style, they focus on finding a shared language. The ambient pop collage of Strawberry Season and washed-out Americana of lacuna and parlor find a foil in the plugged-in folktronica of the sword and lonely feedback meltdowns of scrutiny portrait. Any icy edges have been melted down, resulting in nearly 80 minutes of glitchy, understated play. There’s no shortage of otherworldly soundscapes on Computer and recording works for girls, but the main thrust of the album is the inventive intimacy of hanging with a friend and trying out weird shit.
Both artists appear interested in excavating the inconsistencies of memory. The ghosts of familiar melodies fill the crevices of “2 lesbians and a broken radiator,” while “phone charger (crazy guitar solo)” reimagines the tectonic shifts of post-rock in hushed, candlelit terms. M. Sage adds incandescent clarinet to “dog sweater,” a fragmented mosaic in which no sound maintains its integrity for long. The undercurrent of emotion is most explicit on “geoguessr,” featuring hyper-online pop experimenter 8485; the song’s heartworn glitch-folk is the closest thing to a ballad on the album.
The duo’s songs come alive in carefully assembled layers of sound. “My chains” finds beauty in chilly, flickering drone, attempting to render the air between them as vividly as the music in their heads, and landing somewhere between a Metroid soundtrack and the work of Lia Kohl. In the album’s most startling moment, a distorted radio comes to life and starts blasting Augustana’s “Boston,” blurrily jumbling time and place.
Unexpected transmissions of dramatic mid-aughts piano-rock fluff aside, the album’s dimensions are mapped most clearly on the opener, “Get there,” contoured by Lynn Avery’s understated 12-string guitar. Re-pitched vocals, plinking turn-signal synths, and Maurice’s violin mingle with bleary-eyed recollections and half-remembered strums. Adding to the song’s damaged patina, it was re-recorded on the Voice Memos app on one of their phones, then crossfaded together with the original recording. Over seven minutes, the whole thing dissipates into vapor. That sort of experimentation is typical of the album’s ramshackle charm. Computer and recording works for girls stares down the ephemeral with tenderness and camaraderie; beneath the wistfulness lies a sense of warm gratitude. It feels like a friendship made audible.
