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You get the impression that Texan experimentalists, instrumentalists and sound artists claire rousay and mari maurice, who performs as more eaze, will never make two similar albums. If anything, no floor is conceptually closer to their 2020 debut, if I don’t let myself be happy now then when?, than the autotune pop of 2022’s never stop texting me, but it’s still a far cry. if I don’t, used found sound and field recordings to explore life experiences in abstract, whereas no floor, an instrumental record, eschews the found sound approach for the most part and focuses more on created music as collage, with pedal steel and slow guitar swirling among electronic beeps and low violin notes, giving the music a more Americana through a lens bent.
Found sound can be detected in places, however, albeit more as a nod to past methods than a character defining approach. It’s most present on the lovely limelight, illegally, a piece built on the most delicate of guitar parts, with beautiful violin notes and humid pedal steel jostling with hums, beeps and buzzes. Some quiet laughter is quickly drowned out by a shard of electric sound near the beginning; the same metallic sound squeezes out a barely audible conversation in the final few seconds. It feels like a deliberate move, with the found sounds quiet enough to feel like remembered sounds, like the duo is telling us that this album is about the music they make together as a creative partnership.
But there are also suggestions of each artist’s solo work throughout no floor, with more eaze’s pedal steel – prominent through lacuna and parlor – a key player here, and claire’s delicately picked guitar (best presented here on the gorgeous kinda tropical) that framed much of her sentiment album, just as important. But no floor is its own thing, a strange beast, as light as air in places and itchy and eerie in others.
And this can all happen within one song, lowcountry being a decent example. The first half takes us slowly through a ghost world, with electronic glitches disrupting the picture and soft strings reassuring us before a sharp and repetitive percussion part begins a kind of hypnosis. By the three-minute mark, plucked strings have upped the urgency before giving way to sweeping strings and delicate piano. In some ways, it brings to mind Allen Karpinski’s The Midwest: Great Plains, the Rust Belt, and Great Lakes from his stunning Solo Acoustic Vol. 6 (one of my all-time favourites), with the music taking us on a stark journey through landscapes (there is even a snippet of train sound at the very end). Wonderful stuff.
hopefields begins in a more conventional manner, with claire picking a strong yet wistful line that is soon joined by the pedal steel. Some minor chord shifts give this piece a feeling of longing pronounced by the pedal steel and moving us into ambient country territory. That is until around the halfway point, when the structure of the music disintegrates and lower pulses drift around washes of pedal steel. It is moving music, certainly, and bold, with the two players working at a high level together and presenting sounds that are constantly surprising.
This can be said for no floor as a whole; the duo’s most organic and free-flowing record is full of ideas and uses the collage form to its full potential, with not a wasted note to be heard. It is a lean album, with five tracks spanning thirty minutes, and has been crafted impeccably. Highly recommended.
no floor (March 21st, 2025) Thrill Jockey
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