more eaze and claire rousay’s collaborations are effortlessly joyful, their music evoking the
warmth and respect they have for each other. Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown
of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively,
and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. more
eaze (the moniker of violinist/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice) and rousay have spent the
past decade pushing boundaries, standing together at the vanguard of genre-shattering music
that thrills and surprises with its vulnerability and creativity. no floor weds their prowess as
sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists.
Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous
collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own
version of Americana.
The duo’s ever-widening sonic scope is centered in their mastery of collage. Known for their
extensive use of found sound and hyper pop escapades, maurice and rousay employ a more
traditional compositional approach. On no floor the pair created their own elaborate sound world
rather than manipulating field recordings. “It was a conscious choice to spend a lot of time
making fucked up sounds and then figuring out how they could be beautiful in another context,”
notes maurice. “With this record I had no idea what claire would do on each track, and we were
both trying to match each other’s ‘freak’ in terms of sound design.” Movements across each
piece uncover the ecstatic in nuance. The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute
gestures and textural swells, carried by maurice and rousay’s enmeshed sonics. rousay’s
ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel.
Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and
release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each
passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.
The five tracks that make up no floor were named for seminal bars in the pair’s shared history,
or as the duo humorously refer to them, “Pillars of our debauchery.” no floor is an introspective
reflection on the emotional turmoil of youth as much as it is a celebration of a camaraderie
forged in that turmoil. Freneticism dances atop the placid textures of pieces like “kinda tropical”
and “limelight, illegally”, embodying the playfulness that comes with reveling in kinship at a
shared safe space. The more reserved “hopfields” and “the applebees outside kalamazoo,
michigan” reflect the less familiar locales of their namesakes, the former a sumptuous special
occasion that glimmers with soft light and the latter a slow roil of the uncertainty and
strangeness that comes with touring as experimental artists in one’s youth. “As we moved from
being very close together to living further away and being involved in different scenes, we had
more serious conversations,” notes rousay. “In the past it was more plug and play, where with
this record we talked about every aspect before and while working on it.”
The pieces of no floor are born of the deep connection between more eaze and claire rousay,
built from strands of familiarity and surprise, the two buttressing one another as they push
themselves as instrumentalists, composers, and artists to unexplored boundaries. The wordless
timbral compositions retain the duo’s lyrical approach to their craft. Infused with melody, the
pieces are collages of sound and emotion. no floor exemplifies the duo’s shared skills in
unearthing new and exciting sound arrangements, evoking the warmth and affection of their
friendship and musical fearlessness.