Consider Texan artists claire rousay and Mari Maurice, aka extra eaze, as a sort of social-media age Ween: their collaborations marked by marriages of lo-fi experimentalism and pop requirements, irreverent humor, and—above all—stressed genre-hopping. Their first album collectively, 2020’s if I don’t let myself be glad now then when, explored their experiences rising up in San Antonio and popping out as trans girls by means of a shifting morass of discipline recordings. Extrapolating shared pursuits in discovered sound, pitch-shifted vocals, and Third Eye Blind, they conceptualized a style they termed “emo ambient”: typified by a music like “Smaller Swimming pools,” from 2021’s An Afternoon Whine, however morphing on tracks like By no means Cease Texting Me spotlight “Kyle” —with its crystalline synths and lure beats—into one thing nearer to hyperpop.
Their newest collaboration, no ground, is one other left flip: an instrumental document constructed round collaged electro-acoustic sounds that tells the story of their friendship by means of portraits of bars and venues—memorialized within the monitor titles—that they’ve visited. Combining components of the pair’s joint and solo tasks, these spacious, shifting instrumentals are instantly identifiable because the work of rousay and Maurice. Should you’re new to their music, it is a very fairly and distinctive ambient document, although the impressionistic model is prone to resonate most strongly with listeners who’re already acquainted (say, those that is perhaps intrigued by the title’s attainable relationship with “ground pt2” from By no means Cease Texting Me, or “ground pt.3” from An Afternoon Whine). When you image the pair in motion, no ground turns into a shifting illustration of what it’s like for shut buddies to make very area of interest music within the huge expanse of America.
For the initiated, a part of the enjoyment in no ground is in figuring out the 2 musicians’ inventive voices in dialog. In opener “Hopfields,” rousay’s brittle, ostinato guitar, which nods to final 12 months’s album sentiment, is joined by Maurice’s craving pedal metal, which remembers final 12 months’s lacuna and parlor. Whereas these songs aren’t introduced as duets, “Hopfields” establishes a young familiarity that runs by means of the document, even when Maurice’s violin and the pair’s joint electronics blur, as within the triumphant closing of “Lowcountry.”
One other mainstay of their work, discovered sound, takes a backseat right here. rousay’s music has featured pencils, overheard dialog, and housekeys; Maurice as soon as composed a piece “for an ensemble of amplified portal followers.” When discipline recordings make their method into no ground, reside or synthesised sounds quickly pull the main focus. If these are footsteps close to the highest of “Kinda Tropical,” they rapidly give option to ambient synths and guitar strums, whereas the overheard chatter that closes “Limelight, Illegally” is interrupted by a tough, artificial lurch.
