EXPERIMENTAL
BY JOHN MULVEY
more eaze & claire rousay
★★★★
no floor
THRILL JOCKEY. DL/LP
Ambient elegy for debauched Texan youth.
The burgeoning genre of Ambient Americana can often tend towards slightly insipid soundscaping, to shoegazers with a pedal-steel trying to make their own Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. This duo set by prolific composers mari ‘more eaze’ maurice and claire rousay (all lower case is their preferred formatting), however, is a graceful example of the genre’s possibilities. The pair grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and the tracks are named after bars that served as “pillars of our debauchery” in their youth. But the prevailing vibe is reflective rather than rowdy, with rousay’s guitar and maurice’s steel and violin operating in a delicately glitching electronic zone that’s at once serene and uncanny; redolent of big spaces and older cultural traditions, radically reprocessed. Out of deep individual discographies – and note mari maurice figured on MOJO 375’s Experimental Album Of The Month, as part of Austin drone rock collective Water Damage – this one’s a real keeper.