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mari maurice – COTFG Interview Series

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In this new series, COTFG will be interviewing artists in Austin and beyond about their influences, how they’ve been adapting to the new musical landscape, and what “experimental” means to them.

For over five years, mari maurice has been performing as more eaze and in that time has become a fixture of the Austin experimental music scene. She has also collaborated with many other artists including local legends The Octopus Project, and has recently stated the imprint label new computer girls ltd.

COTFG: What were your musical or general artistic influences for your recent work?

mari maurice: musically, a lot of my recent work has drawn from sources that are equally contemporary and nostalgic. I’m always interested in revisiting and learning from maligned artists or genres from the recent past and often find that there are crucial elements in that work that are being manifested in a lot of the most interesting music currently being made. i love thinking about how different stylistic worlds interact and am always drawn to the idea of blurring the lines in between.

I’ve also been super influenced and inspired by collaborating a ton recently. this was taking place in more of a live setting last year but covid has obviously shifted that focus more towards recording. actually sitting down and working on a track with someone remotely is amazing and helps me break out of myself so much. I love seeing how other people structure their music as they’re writing it and hearing how personality shines through in decisions they make. also, it feels refreshing to finally let go of some control after primarily working as a solo artist for years.

more generally, I’ve been influenced a lot by ASMR, reading and watching a lot of heady sci-fi, trying to navigate friendship, romance, & intimacy in the midst of a plague, and exploring the potentiality of quotidian activities and moments.

What’s an ASMR vid you’d like to share with people who have no idea where to start in that world?

I think a lot of people truly get freaked out by ASMR because of the regular whispering and the vocal aspect of it. Personally, I love it and truly enjoy how subliminal and barely there the voice in ASMR often seems. I think people sometimes find the use of voice and roleplaying voyeuristic but to me it really invokes the warm sensation of nodding off while listening to a story or conversation. However, I also truly find the sound design and purposefulness of this world very wonderful so, for someone who is interested in ASMR but is maybe intimidated by the vocal aspect, I’d recommend this video and anything else like it. The small panned scratchy sounds are so calming and get me kind of choked up because of how simple and beautiful they are. I like listening to this one with no visuals and just hearing the slight changes in surface and texture.

I also really love this video which is perhaps more on the side of what people tend to dislike about it but there’s something about this one that just instantly produces a tingle for me. I actually made a track a few years ago that sampled parts of several classroom/language asmr videos because they often involved similar arcs or specific tics and I wanted to randomize them and see how they’d overlap. This video is not the most amazing but it just gets me every time and immediately produces the phenomenon for me (I think a lot of older videos are a bit more consistently conscious of that).

What have you been listening to lately?

some things that have been in heavy rotation:
galore by oklou, “discuss and come” back by AIR Krew, euphoria by insides, the colour of spring by talk talk, spring summer 2020 by special guest dj, hotel nota by Romeo Poirier, dumb luck by dntel, primrose avenue by space afrika, i let it in and it took everything by loathe, more than friends by himera, trash eaters and face down in meta by pet shimmers
I’ve also been generally revisiting/rediscovering a lot of early 4AD stuff and early 00s screamo/post-hardcore.

(links by COTFG)

What other ways of expression do you hope to explore using recorded video or live streaming?

I haven’t done much in the way of live-streaming yet but I really like how it changes the idea of what a “performance” is. I’d like to eventually perform/record a live set and essentially build videos around footage/audio of me performing. the idea of things cutting out and just becoming more of a video piece is very appealing to me.

What does experimental/avant-garde mean to you?

personally, I think that experimental and avant garde are often problematic terms that get thrown around equally for labelling and branding or worse as a method for a politics of exclusion. is there really something “experimental” or cutting edge about a drone or harsh noise record when both of these genres have existed for decades? at this point, there are signifiers in tons of subgenres branded “experimental” that are just as formally embedded as verse/chorus song structure. I often think that these terms are applied to more extreme/obscure genres as a way of othering anything that doesn’t strictly follow a narrow and limited view of what “experimental” means. for me, experimental is when any work of art is trying to challenge or push forward a new and/or distinct conversation about whatever medium they’re working in. to me, records like ar kane’s sixty nine, chief keef’s thot breaker, and farrah abraham’s my teenage dream ended are all a million times more ground breaking and experimental than any record of pipe organ drone or modular synth noodling. I don’t think experimental or avant garde music is fixed to a particular genre or a set of aesthetic signifiers. for instance, all three of the records I mentioned are all so truly bizarre and unidentifiable but all these artists would be excluded from most institutions that claim to champion the avant-garde because they fail to adhere to an antiquated notion of what experimental music is. I am always looking for the records/artists pushing the boundaries of whatever respective world they inhabit and to me that action, whether intentional or not , is what’s truly experimental. I should note that I mean none of my examples listed here to be read as criticisms of any particular style of music as I love many things that fall into the categories of noise, drone, etc… I mostly mention these examples to hopefully illustrate the complicated nature of the term experimental as a stylistic signifier.

In what ways have you been collaborating? What technology have you been using? What has and hasn’t been working?

I’ve primarily been collaborating via recording with a number of different projects. Most of it is in the form of direct partnerships where everyone is writing and coming up with ideas equally but I’ve also worked on a few projects where I’ve just been a session musician/arranger and I really enjoy that as well. Personally, I use ableton as a DAW but I use a lot of hardware as well. I frequently use a korg electribe, minilogue, and small modular synth setup as well as acoustic instruments and my voice. Approaching each track as something serious/new and really letting things reach their full potential through lots of editing and just being open to where something “feels” like it needs to go has worked best so far. Before COVID, I was doing a ton of live collaboration/improvisation and I would tailor my live setup for working with specific collaborators so I think for a while I was really married to the idea of starting a lot of things as a “live” improvisation or idea but I’ve pretty quickly found that taking this approach to studio work hasn’t always produced the best results. It’s been nice to step back and get past the feeling that all these ideas need to start as the genesis of something “live.”

You can hear mari maurice’s work as more eaze on bandcamp and follow her on instagram

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