by Joseph Mastel
As of late, claire rousay and more eaze (Mari Maurice) have made some of the most creatively intriguing, weirdly catchy, strangely hypnotic, and wildly avant-garde electronic and ambient music. Their solo and collaborative work is always highly original in their their fascinating utilization of heavily autotuned vocals and field recordings. The duo’s new collaborative album no floor celebrates ten years of friendship and sees them experimenting with new sounds.
Recently, Post-Trash chatted with more eaze about no floor, her creative process, and her friendship with claire rousay.
more eaze by Sarah Beth Tomberlin
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joseph Mastel: How did the new album, no floor, come about?
more eaze: Sometime around 2023, we worked on a new track together, and it will probably never get released. It came out pretty good, but it was more in the pop realm of things and was also the sequel to our series of songs all titled “floor.” It felt like a lot of the same territory that we had been mining for the last few years. Instrumentally, that track is not super dissimilar to a lot of the sounds on no floor in that there’s a lot of pedal steel, strings, and more acoustic instruments intermingled with electronics. That was the start.
Around that time, claire and I read the book about Kranky records, You’re With Stupid and really loved it. Both of us were really diving into the Kranky cinematic universe at the time. We were already fans, but that book gives this huge survey of Kranky and all of the cross-pollination happening in Chicago at the time. It definitely turned me on to a lot of new stuff, and I know it affected claire too. We started talking about that, and we were both really into Stars of the Lid’s early stuff. Reading that book reignited our love of that band. When we initially started working on this, we were jokingly calling it ‘Dolls of the Lid’ as we were sending each other the first few rough sketches.
The second we started doing stuff outside of our normal comfort zone was the genesis [for no floor.] We made a very conscious decision to shy away from using a lot of field recordings and limit ourselves in terms of making songs. We were like, ‘No vocals and no field recordings,’ because those were two things that were very big on our previous collaborations. We decided to do something that was a bit different and challenge ourselves to write more texturally but also almost in a kind of chamber-y space in terms of thinking about ‘were gonna have this instrument do this thing here.’
JM: You mentioned that you used a lot of field recordings and auto-tuned vocals in previous collaborations. What interested you in using those things?
more eaze: To some extent, a sense of documentation with the field recordings and recording everything. A lot of my background is in making musique concrète when I was in college and grad school. That was my first big love in terms of composing. I was really into composers like Francis Dhomont and Michel Chion. I worked with a lot of field recordings and found sounds there but it was all very edited and pretty intentional. I think both of us were more interested in using them in a way that was kind of a commentary on space and the façade of a recording studio you’re always walking into. People are always trying to fight with ambient space. But we were like, ‘Let's embrace this as a function of how we record’ because, especially on some of those earlier recordings, we really had very limited setups.
We both leveled up a lot since then, but it was like two or three channel interfaces and a handful of mics. The idea that you can capture something or potentially have material for a composition anywhere. A lot of the field recordings on a lot of those earlier pieces are largely just voice memos that we took while walking around, like, ‘This is a cool sound. Let’s capture it while we’re here and then figure out how we can compose around this.’
I’ve used auto-tuned vocals for basically the entire time I’ve worked as more eaze. When we made our first record if I don’t let myself be happy now then when?, claire was doing more tabletop percussion music at the time, and I was starting to do these live sets that were rooted in free improv. I was playing modular synth and doing auto-tune vocals and then usually processing the voice through the synthesizer. Needless to say, we’ve expanded the palette quite a bit as we continued recording that record, but one of the ideas we initially had was that it would be something we could perform as a duo with the synth and percussion. We did a few shows like that right before everything really went into lockdown.
We were into the idea of using auto-tune as an improvisational instrument and as this other facet. We’re both really big fans of Elvin Brandhi, who does a lot of this. Her work has been very impactful on both claire and I. The two of us also love a lot of pop music, especially mid-2010s emo rap adjacent stuff. I think a lot of the most experimental music that was happening at that time was more in that sphere of people pushing what that genre meant in terms of pop and rap music in general. So both of us were like ‘Why aren’t people in the experimental community utilizing these tools as another part of their vocabulary in terms of improvisation and composition?’ A big part came from us being like, ‘I want to hear this type of sound world but in this more avant-garde way.’ Then, of course, we made our own fragmented attempt at doing pop music as well.
JM: What’s the most interesting field recording that you’ve recorded?
more eaze: There are two really memorable ones on an afternoon whine. I think both sounds are on the track “floor pt. 3.” There’s a sound of claire’s dog close-mic eating her food. It’s pretty visceral and pretty ‘in your face.’ The other sound I really love on that track is a lot of breathing noise through saxophone. claire decided to duet with that by recording herself scratching on a frisbee. Then we ran the frisbee through a bunch of filters.
JM: How does the collaboration process work between you and claire?
more eaze: Typically, one of us will send a track and have a pretty fleshed outline of what it should be, but then there’s a lot of space to fill it. Working remotely, that’s how it’s been. Most of the time, it’s ‘Here’s this thing I started. What if we go from point A to B here? Then, let’s fill in the blanks and figure out how this can be edited.' Usually, once we have all the parts together, I mix it all, and that’s how we establish it.
There’s a couple of tracks on no floor that we did in person. When we work in person, it’s very different in that it’s a moment-by-moment situation where it’s like, ‘Here’s this sound. What if we do this next?’ It has an improvisational element when the two of us are in the same room. For example, an afternoon whine was all recorded in the same room. The only thing I think I did on my own was I wrote the chords and overall structure of “smaller pools” on that record. claire came in and added a verse, then we hung out in person and did a bunch of overdubs and deconstructed that track. Most of the time when we work together, it’s working section by section, like, ‘Where can we go from here? What can this next move be.’ The first track on no floor, “hopfields,” is us in the same room being like, ‘Here’s this idea. Here’s this idea.’ I think you can hear it in the approach to that song. We did some other stuff like that as well when we were working on the original version of “lowcountry.” It started as a genesis of us playing live, and it wound up very different from that initial playing around with different sample sessions.
When we do pop songs, sometimes it can be a bit more like one of us produces the thing and sends it to the other person who will add their elements and arrange a little bit. It can be more like one person does the bulk of things and the other person does the ‘cherry on top.’ For no floor and the more experimental records, it’s all been very much we’re in the same room or we’re sending files back and forth and really splitting things 50/50.
JM: My favourite song from no floor is “hopfields”. Would you be able to share the instrumentation behind the song and what you two were trying to establish through it?
more eaze: claire came to visit me at one point in 2023 when I was still living in Texas. Hopfields is a kind of fancy French restaurant and bar not very far from my apartment at the time. I had only recently discovered it. Super good food. At the time, both of us were drinking, and the drinks were very strong (laughs). We went there, and I think that afternoon or the next day, we decided to record the song and name it “hopfields.” We were already talking about the tracks on no floor being about places and particular moments in our friendship and what those spaces mean or how they’ve changed. This was very much an immediate ‘Let’s call it after this place that we just had a great hangout.’
We had these quieter textures that are going in the background, and claire picked up my guitar and started playing that repetitive guitar riff that happens throughout the whole first half of the song. As she kept playing it, we decided to do some things to fuck with the tone of that. It was run out of a practice amp and then through a cassette emulator in Ableton, so the guitar has this sort of degraded digital-ish quality to it, which I really like. Even though it still sounds clean and is very identifiable. We started arranging things around it. I immediately was like, ‘I hear this pedal steel melody’ and started writing this pedal steel melody. We like to always have elements in our songs that are a little bit left up to chance or floaty, so with that song, there was at least one modular synth patch that’s just self-generating, kind of oscillating in the background the whole time. Eventually, that takes over in the middle section, and claire was also doing a synth thing in the middle section, so we were like, ‘Let’s start arranging around this and growing this out of the drone.’
JM: “hopfields” has very country and Americana influences, as does the whole record. What led you two to lean more into those influences?
more eaze: Both of us have pretty deep backgrounds in country music. We both grew up in Texas. I grew up playing fiddle with a lot of local bands and also playing my extremely shitty folk songs with a lot of old guys. So, that was a huge part of my vocabulary. In the last two or three years, I’ve picked up pedal steel, so that was something we’ve been utilizing a lot more. But claire also was a drummer for a number of country bands over the years, actually when she was really young. The two of us really have that in our blood, more or less. I think it’s interesting because even though a couple of these tracks were started in Texas, most of them were completed separately in Los Angeles or New York. I think maybe there was an element of reflection on our past and being in this part of the country for a while that is very synonymous with country music in Texas and our backgrounds. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, I would say. It was much more the things we were playing around with and seeing what would happen. There was this one piece that we did talk about a lot by Harold Budd, with Daniel Lanois on pedal steel, “The Serpent (In Quicksilver),” that was definitely something that came up a lot when we were talking about our record. It’s a great piece. I think we were both really into the idea of working with something like that where it’s largely chamber music for pedal steel and piano.
JM: Another fascinating thing I find is the song title “the applebee’s outside kalamazoo, michigan”. Does that specific Applebee’s have a special meaning to you two or why did you name it that?
more eaze: (laughs) It does have a kind of special meaning. It was at the end of one of our first duo tours together. claire and I did a bunch of touring in 2015-2018 and for a couple of tours, she was in more eaze. I was doing more eaze sets with her doing drums and parts of stuff that I’d written for her to play. As she started getting more established with her solo work and solo percussion sets, we did a tour where we really should have been playing together, but we were doing separate sets. I was doing an all electronic more eaze set, and she was doing an all drum claire set. We played at this festival for a record label that we did a bunch of releases for, Already Dead Tapes; a great record label. They had a big festival in Kalamazoo every year for a number of years, so we played it, and I think I had an early flight from Chicago the next day, and we were like, ‘We should really just go back to Chicago.’
We started driving, and both of us were super hungry. Everything in Kalamazoo was closed after this festival except for this Applebees that was right outside the city. So we went and ate at Applebees and had this longer through the night drive that was very bonding. I remember we listened to a lot of pretty goofy music. I showed her this mashup I'm obsessed with of “Fix You” by Coldplay and “Toxicity” by System Of A Down. It’s amazing. There’s something about Serj’s over-the-top vocals with the more ambient parts of “Fix You” that sounds so fucking good, and I feel like it cancels out any cheesiness from the original Coldplay version. We started playing a lot of Weezer deep cuts (laughs). I remember being absolutely shocked because she put on the Weezer and Lil Wayne song “Can’t Stop Partying” and knew every part of the Lil Wayne verse verbatim. It was a very big bonding night, and I think this night as we were talking about all this music, like, ‘We should be incorporating these kinds of things into our practices more.’ It took us a couple of years after that to start experimenting with that idea, but it was definitely a place where we had this cute bonding moment of comradery after a long day at this festival and then a long drive through the night. It really sticks out as a place we had a great time hanging out at (laughs).
JM: Is it ever difficult to translate your music to a live setting because it is so ambient and experimental?
more eaze: It’s gonna be a really interesting experiment to see how we figure out performing these pieces live. When we were playing more around the time of if I don’t let myself be happy now then when?, that was a little easier in some ways because even though the pieces on that album are a bit more composed, working with that palette of sounds live was pretty easy. It was basically a two-table setup, and we were able to feed off of each other and really interact. For no floor, it will be interesting because I think it's gonna be more composed but in the fashion that we want. We’re trying to figure out having something that’s a little unpredictable in terms of how we interact with things. We have a few shows booked where claire will be playing an upright piano, I’ll be playing pedal steel and violin, and then both of us will be running some sort of electronic system on top of that. I think that we wrote a lot of our music from the last couple of years with the idea of ‘We need to figure out how to play this live.’ I think we both learned from past mistakes about that. A lot of times, it’s the idea of leaving a lot of freedom for other people to do stuff.
JM: How do you think you and claire have evolved as musicians since your last release or when you first started making music together?
more eaze: We would not have made anything this clean-sounding when we started at all, both from a sheerly technical side and our own taste and proclivities. Both of us were a lot more antsy about getting from point A to B in a piece of music. I think there’s still a little bit of that, but it’s subtle now.
In this case, we really wanted to make a classic ambient or drone record. Something that would feel timeless in a way, not to be too self-aggrandizing, but that was something we definitely talked about. I think we both feel really proud of the other work we’ve done, but I feel like it feels a bit more like a document in a particular moment in our lives or what was going on musically. I feel like this was more thinking about ‘what are these things that we really like that we want to hear more and expand upon and comment on.’
JM: Something I really like about your and claire’s music, with your collaborations with each other, other people, or solo stuff, is that it is very outside the box and seems to defy or break the rules in music in the way you two experiment and push boundaries with it. Is it always your intention to make music that not a lot of other people are maybe making or something that is wildly different?
more eaze: Thanks! To some extent, I think that’s true, but I also think a lot of it is really what we’re interested in. I’ve never really tried to fit into a particular zeitgeist thing, and I don’t think claire has either. I think for both of us, it's largely just very much about what we’re interested in at a particular moment. Of course, that changes. Any sort of idea of challenging things or pushing beyond something is really us just looking for what we want out of a musical experience. I’m always looking for that. I love pop music and I love all kinds of music. But I always want to be surprised in some way or stunned a little bit. That is something, at least for me, I’m always chasing after. Sometimes, it's something brand new, like I was listening to this record by an artist called Glint and was totally blown away by it. I feel like it does a lot of things that I like independently that I wouldn’t have thought of hearing as a compositional thing altogether. But sometimes that also happens listening to 70s prog groups like Godley & Creme where I’m like, ‘Holy Shit. I can’t believe these guys were doing this at this time like. This sounds like it could come out on Orange Milk Records today.'
It's just always looking for that experience like, ‘What the fuck is this? How did they do it?’ I’m always chasing that feeling with the work I’m doing. I want to hear interesting gestures or want to hear what happens when you have a nice, pretty folk song sequenced with something that’s a pretty crazy expansive glitch piece. It's not necessarily like it's supposed to be a provocation to the audience or anything. It's more for both of us, I think, a sincere desire to experience the music that we’re creating and wanting to hear music like that. It's something I've talked about with my partner, who is also a musician as well, and it’s like, ‘Why would you wanna make music that you don’t want to listen to. Wouldn’t you wanna make something that is trying to touch on all the things you love in some way or trying to ask a question that you’re interested in seeing the response to?’ That’s something claire and I talk about all the time. When writing I think that’s something that’s always on our minds, like ‘I want to make something that I want to listen to that’s gonna make me cry.’ Or ‘ I wanna make something because I don’t hear anything else like this, and I want to hear what would happen if I see this experiment through its completion.’
JM: What does no floor mean to you personally?
more eaze: It really feels like this culmination of our friendship. At one point, claire wanted to call it ‘A Decade Under The Influence’ because it's been about ten years of us being friends, which is amazing. One of the longest running friendships definitely in my life. I think initially that was really kind of at the forefront of our minds making this. To me it definitely feels like this sort of a new chapter in our musical relationship and collaboration. After ten years of friendship and working with each other creatively, it definitely feels like a pretty big mature statement too. Another bandied title for this record was ‘I’m Serious’ (laughs). I feel like sometimes people think we’re trying to troll or fuck with people in terms of the music that we’re making, whether that be really over the top autotuned pop or these insane collage pieces. But it's always very much because we have a sincere interest in this. Any sort of provocation or someone's take on that is ultimately them bringing their own experience into that. For us, we’re genuinely very interested in this from a compositional standpoint, and I think that what we wanted to do with no floor was ‘Let's see what happens if we make this record that’s a very clean record, and a very patient, slow to develop type of thing.’ For me, it feels like a culmination of all these things but also the start of something new.
no floor is out now via Thrill Jockey. Listen below: