Experimental musicians Mari Maurice and Claire Rousay are now based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, respectively, and they both have extensive discographies of their own. But when they began releasing collaborative records in 2020, they lived in Texas. They became best friends in San Antonio, when Rousay was playing noise rock and Maurice (aka More Eaze) was playing country, and on their new album, No Floor (Thrill Jockey), they’ve named all five tracks after bars with important roles in their shared history—and the title “Limelight, Illegally” gives you some idea how far back that history goes.
The pastoral instrumental pieces on No Floor depart from the duo’s earlier collaborations, which attempt to import the supersaturated sonics of emo rap and hyperpop into an avant-garde space. Their first album together, If I Don’t Let Myself Be Happy Now Then When? (which celebrates the bond they formed by helping each other through transition), piles Auto-Tuned vocals and glitchy, pneumatic synths atop collages of manipulated field recordings, pillowy drones, and fingerpicked guitar. On 2022’s Never Stop Texting Me, Maurice and Rousay process rambunctious, maudlin pop tunes to within an inch of their lives, using vocal sounds that feel bolded, italicized, and underlined.
But when the two of them began work on No Floor in 2023, they decided to leave their comfort zone. “We made a very conscious decision to shy away from using a lot of field recordings and limit ourselves in terms of making songs,” Maurice told Post-Trash in a March 2025 interview. “We were like, ‘No vocals and no field recordings.’”
The found sounds in the duo’s previous collaborations range widely—Rousay scratching a Frisbee, her dog eating right next to a mike—but on No Floor the only such recording I can hear seems to be the chatter of patrons leaving a bar. The album relies much more heavily on conventional instruments: Rousay plays piano and acoustic guitar, while Maurice plays acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and violin. (Both also contribute electronics.) The compositions have an unraveled sort of looseness that comes in part from chance elements—in “Hopfields,” a self-generating modular synth patch just does its own thing in the background—but they also feel patient and serene.
On “Limelight, Illegally,” sighs of pedal steel and languid swells of violin keep getting stepped on by noise—cavernous booms, blurts of twinkling sine tones—but the mood nonetheless remains ruminative. “Lowcountry” uses radiant piano notes to intermittently illuminate a slowly revolving string drone and crumpled interjections of static, which give way to a walking rhythm on plucked guitar and then to melodramatic violin that surges and fades as though you’re walking through a party and overhearing one word from each of a dozen different conversations.
Without vocals, No Floor can’t easily express the good humor and playful vulnerability of Maurice and Rousay’s previous collaborations, but it compensates in other ways: The willingness to depart from abstraction, to allow sentiment, sends its own message given that so much ambient music is the audio equivalent of a color-field painting in a corporate lobby. The album is cozy and accessible, and despite its slow metabolism, it’s animated by constant development, with no repetition or stasis. No Floor has the energy of two old friends who’ll never run out of things to say to each other.
More Eaze & Claire Rousay Thu 4/10, 8 PM, International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore, sold out, all ages
