more eaze: Fried Jams & Stoner Goofballs
Mari Rubio calls for more humor and less 'all-black frowning aesthetic' in experimental music
Mari Rubio’s new solo album as more eaze, sentence structure in the country, might be her most instantly gratifying work so far.
Channeling her many disparate influences, it creates a playful tapestry of autotuned vocals over elements of post-rock (not the crescendocore kind, the original Gastr Del Sol kind), folk and Americana, chamber music and free improv.
The result is a wonderful oddball pop record that never just plays it safe. It’s fun and challenging at the same time, and that’s actually what I’m often missing these days in experimental music.
Growing up as an indie-rock-leaning folk fiddle player in San Antonio, Mari went off to study composition at Cal Arts in L.A., then returned to Texas to live and work in Austin for a number of years until moving to Brooklyn, where she’s been based ever since.
Chances are you’ve come across her name and music alongside fellow Texan experimental composer claire rousay, with whom she released the collaborative album no floor (Thrill Jockey, 2025), or through previous solo records like Oneiric (OOH-Sounds, 2021) or lacuna and parlor (Mondoj, 2024), which were brilliant in their own right.
Leading up to the release of her new album, I spoke to Mari at length about playing James Tenney for a bunch of drunks in honky-tonks, singing Elliott Smith to an audience of indifferent friends at Karaoke, and being in an “experimental lesbian goofball duo” with her partner.
When you think back to your childhood in San Antonio, Texas, what’s the actual soundscape like?
A lot of conjunto and tejano music ambiently around everywhere, and country music too. I have these vivid memories of going to downtown San Antonio. When I was young, it felt like New York City to me, like Times Square. My brother and I loved to walk around the River Walk, and I remember the sound of running water, birds everywhere, and music playing from different businesses. But there’s also a lot of silence. I grew up out in the suburbs, and there’s a lot of cicada and cricket sounds. It was not a particularly noisy place.
When did you take up your first instrument?
I started playing guitar when I was about 12 or 13 and took lessons for a while. I wound up getting a teacher who was really good at teaching music theory, and it just clicked for me. Pretty shortly after, I convinced my parents to let me buy a cheap, shitty mandolin. I was into bluegrass and old country folk music, which was also music I heard a lot growing up. I basically figured out how to play it myself, because I already had the theory.
I got my first violin when I was 15 and picked it up really fast. Mandolin is tuned the same as violins, so it was pretty easy. I practiced all throughout the summer. I became instantly obsessed with it. I was already writing and playing my little shitty folk songs out and about at different honky-tonks and restaurants. Once I started playing the violin, I really wanted to play with other people. Violin is an instrument that demands a lot of isolation when you’re practicing, but it thrives as a social instrument. Thankfully, I was surrounded by a lot of very nice older musicians in San Antonio. I started sitting in with folks playing fiddle and figuring my way out around their songs and the instrument at the same time, and that became a major love of mine.
There are these clichés about musicians having certain personality traits related to the instrument they’re playing…
(laughs) There are definitely certain personality traits to people who are drawn towards the violin. I can tell somebody’s a violinist before they even tell me, just because they have this low hum of anxiety. We are a very anxious bunch. Violin is such an unforgiving, exacting instrument, so when you’re drawn towards it, there’s maybe a certain element of masochism to it. I teach young students how to play violin, and the ones that tend to have a natural proclivity to it, they often seem a little stressed out and hyper-focused. Some kids really just pick it up and have such a natural ability to play it off the bat, and then other kids, they’ve been in lessons for six weeks, and you’re still flipping which hand you’re trying to play with.
What drew you to the violin?
A big part was just seeing bands with fiddle players that I really liked and admired. This is a little bit embarrassing, but I was really into Andrew Bird. There’s a certain generation of violinists who got into the instrument because of his music. There was a lot of other music at the time, in the early 2000s, that had strings in it. An artist I really liked from San Antonio that I would see all the time growing up was [singer-songwriter] Alejandro Escovedo, and he usually had a cellist and a violinist with him at least.
When I spoke to claire rousay last year, she mentioned seeing you on stage in San Antonio when she was growing up, even though you didn’t even know each other back then.
She’s mentioned this to me a few times. Back then, I’d play with a bunch of people in the DIY world. My foundations were in folk and Americana music, but I rebelled against that in my early 20s. I was very into sophisticated indie rock and started getting into experimental music, especially when I started studying composition, so I left the folk world behind for a little while. I’d been playing with much older musicians in that world, and it was very fun when I was younger and had that mentorship, but I wanted to play with people who are my age, so I joined this band called The Cartographers. That was a pretty life-changing band to be a part of, and one of the bands that claire always mentions seeing. We were quite popular locally.
I also remember this local festival that claire’s old bandmate booked. At this point, I had moved away to Los Angeles, and I just happened to be in town for the holidays, so I played this show. I was running my guitar through the laptop, triggering a bunch of samples and also singing through a bunch of filters. It sounded crazy, a little bit like Fennesz with vocals, but claire has talked to me about how that show has been very impactful for her. I most certainly saw claire play at that show too, because I remember staying for the band that she was in, but I don’t think I caught who she is, because the band literally had like 16 people in it. (laughs)
The experimental music community in San Antonio is fairly small. You eventually get to know everybody. There’s this band Buttercup that claire and I were actually both in at different times, many years apart. The guitar player for Buttercup, Joe Reyes, was a mentor to me growing up and helped me record a lot of my early music. He taught me almost everything I know about engineering and mixing. In the early 2000s, they would put on these weird performance art shows. There was nothing else like that happening in San Antonio, and it was so exciting. They became eventually much more of a pop band. claire and I were both really into their first album, Sick Yellow Flower, which was very experimental, weird indie rock, and then we both wound up being in this band at different times in our lives.
Before you got to know her, you moved away to L.A. to study composition at Cal Arts though. Who were the musicians and composers that inspired you in that formative time?
Even before I moved to Los Angeles, I’d started getting into musique concrète pretty heavily. Then I was slowly getting into Jim O’Rourke’s music, and following the thread through that, listening to everything on Editions Mego and Erstwhile, just really drinking up those worlds. I would camp out at record stores’ experimental music section basically, just go through and find whatever was interesting to me.
I had a pivotal listening discovery when I got into Greg Davis’ label Autumn Records, which was life-changing for me. They were releasing these artists who were making very incredible, complex but beautiful pop music that was pretty spare in its perfection, but they were coming at it from a DIY synth and noise angle. At the same time, Greg was releasing music by composers like Martin Arnold, who was also really big for me. I got to study with Martin a little bit at Cal Arts. He was an insightful, interesting person to talk to, who encouraged the direction I was going in, that would become more eaze.
At Cal Arts, I was mainly studying with [composers] Michael Pisaro and Ulrich Krieger, and they were both incredible teachers. Through talking to them, I would unpack what it was I liked about those things and get pretty in-depth about it. How influence takes form in the work that I’m doing became this huge question I’m always asking in more eaze, and that was very much something that started to develop at Cal Arts.
Your discography goes back to 2015, but I first stumbled across your music during the pandemic. The record that clicked with me was Oneiric, and then more recently, it was lacuna and parlor that really hit me again. I think the new one follows that same thread.
It’s funny, because those are actually two of the albums I’m the most proud of. With Oneiric, I made a lot of that during lockdown. I wanted to try and make something like the music that’s been really foundational to me, the early aughts glitch, musique concrète, ambient type stuff. It did feel almost like a sort of dream logic of how I was working on that. There was an element of fantasy and wondering about what life would be like if I was able to do things normally, during the pandemic. There’s a big sense of romanticism and yearning to that. At the time I was married, and we had opened up our relationship, and that opened the floodgates to have a lot of feelings for people I wasn’t anticipating. I think there was an outpouring of that in Oneiric, just by the idea of being open to the possibility of being intimate with somebody else. It made me have a lot of feelings that I hadn’t felt in a while and that I was trying to capture in the music.
What had changed about your life circumstances when you made lacuna and parlor three years later?
That’s the first record I made once I moved to New York, around three years ago. It feels like such a stripping away of things. I had this realization that I could make chamber music again. It’s interesting how the presentation of your work really impacts what you make, like the venues that you’re playing. In Texas, the work I was doing was a lot more electronic, because I was gonna have to play these bars, and usually they’re gonna put me on a bill with either a rock band or people who are going to be doing clubbier stuff. So even if I’m making music that’s more still, it needs to be able to be very loud, and I need to be able to crank it. In New York, I realized very early on that I can play a lot of these smaller spaces, and there are all these people who are available and want to play music with me. That made a really big difference.
lacuna and parlor has two halves, where the first half is very much like an ensemble, and then it gradually devolves into me just overdubbing and playing everything. It got me back in touch with a lot of music that I really loved when I was in grad school and college. In Austin it wasn’t really possible to play solo violin sets, because I’d go up there and play this piece, and there’s gonna be a bunch of drunk people – it’s not gonna go very well. So I had sort of abandoned that. One time I did actually play the James Tenney violin piece Koan at a bar in Austin, and it did go surprisingly well, but I think it was just a slow night and the only people that were there came to hear that. That was the exception, not the norm. But lacuna and parlor was much more getting back in touch with that side of my work.
Your new album comes across as even more song-based, but there’s also this wild element of free improv breaking into some of the songs, which I love. Talk about inspirations please.
It does feel like a very vivid capturing of my interests, both in terms of what it means for a song to emerge from improvisation, or a more longform process-driven compositional idea. But it also feels like a love letter to the music that I grew up loving from Thrill Jockey. Microstoria was a huge band for me, and so was Oval, and Trans Am, and The Sea and Cake, and so many others. So I was thinking about those worlds merging and collapsing in on one another. I was trying to make a record that 19-year old me would want to hear going through Thrill Jockey’s discography. So it would have some element of songs, but the songs would emerge from this process of collaging and taking one compositional idea and teasing it out, and it would also have this cloudy, glitchy element to it.
As a whole, it does remind me of 1990s post-rock.
I love that music – that is legitimately my favorite music of all time. It’s really like a dream come true to have this on Thrill Jockey, because this was the direction this work was taken anyways. It’s also a rare record where I had actually performed most of this music live before recording it. A foundational thing was this idea that these songs could take a lot of different shapes and forms, depending on who plays them and how they’re presented and arranged. In many cases, I would literally record one version of a song, trash it, and take just this one tiny part from it.
Like, “Distance” has had more versions than any other piece of music I’ve ever made. There’s an older singer-songwriter version of that, and there’s just a flicker from an old take that comes in at the very end, just a bunch of layered, picked guitars. You just hear it for a second. I had to time-stretch it to get it to fit this version of the song. But that’s an example of it, and it’s been exciting to think about.
Now that I’m playing live sets, I’m figuring out how to fuck with the formula now, how to make it sound different from the record. I’m literally going to take a couple of the songs and just play them as solo violin and voice pieces. With a live performance, for me it’s always interesting to think about how the music can be broken and reframed. Most of my favorite live shows I’ve seen have had some element of that.
The lyrics are particularly evocative on this record too. There’s this line in “Distance”: “I sing someone else’s song to a crowd of indifferent friends.” That’s such a striking metaphor for many situations in life.
Oh, thank you. Yeah, it is metaphor and also quite literal. I love a contrast of a song that is narrative, but not giving you all the details or sort of fragmenting that. That particular line is very much about doing karaoke and trying to distract yourself from a relationship that has a lot of literal, physical distance and emotional distance. So you’re going to sing karaoke, and you’re picking a song that you really like, and you think this is for sure going to be a fucking banger, but then nobody cares. It’s an experience I’ve had. I mean, I can really bring the house down at karaoke if I’m feeling emotional. One time I sang “Waltz #2” by Elliott Smith, which is not really on top most people’s heads when singing karaoke. (laughs)
The image in my head was that you’re performing as part of an orchestra, and you’re playing a composition written by someone else to an indifferent concert audience.
I love that. That’s beautiful. I’m so happy to hear you say that, because I don’t want it to feel prescriptive with what a listener might bring into it, even if it is something that’s about a very direct, personal experience. You know, I teach songwriting at this college I work at, and I actually think this is a great case in point of something I’ve tried to teach to my students. There is a desire to have extremely literal, direct lyrics for a lot of younger students, and sometimes it works really well, but even when you sing about something really specific, it should be open to interpretation by anyone else to bring in their own experience or meaning. Sometimes when you get so direct and hyper specific with lyrics, it can also be so universal that it kind of comes back around. My problematic fave is Mark Kozelek – I think about his song, “Carry Me Ohio”, and that is a great example of a song that is clearly about a very specific experience, but has this kernel of universal truth.
I see this tendency too. In editorial writing, being specific is necessary, but you have to be careful, because it dates your work as well.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Sometimes a student would bring in a lyric about TikTok or some horrible thing that’s happening in the news. If they make it a little bit more vague, they can still convey the message, but it will probably be more effective and stand the actual test of time. There’s a lot of music from the early 2000s that has lyrics about the Iraq War and George W. Bush, and those parts maybe haven’t aged so well sometimes. At the same time, there’s a song like “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan, which is extremely specific, but because of the intensity of emotion around it, that actually comes around. It works so well because it’s just telling the story, not necessarily making a statement. It’s more a presentation of the actual narrative and the actual facts.
You’re a very collaborative musician, and besides working with claire rousay, you also have a duo with your partner, guitarist Wendy Eisenberg. In a recent Residence newsletter you were referred to as “Whait, your new favourite experimental lesbian goofball duo”. Humor is quite an underrated aspect in experimental music, isn’t it?
Yeah, I always felt drawn to staff that has a little bit more humor in it. I’m a huge Robert Ashley fan, for example. I literally have a Robert Ashley tattoo. I don’t know if you can see it. (holds her arm into the camera) It’s going to be upside down, but it’s the Automatic Writing. I actually met Mimi Johnson, his widow who runs [the label] Lovely Music. The director of [experimental venue] Roulette actually made me show her my tattoo, and she was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that.” (laughs) That’s her reaction! She’s like, “Somebody sent that to me on Instagram.”
Robert Ashley is maybe my favorite composer of all time, but he’s often very funny. Even a piece like “The Wolfman” is kind of comical. There’s just this joy of play and discovery. I think he never took himself particularly seriously. Same with Julius Eastman too. He can be very confrontational and very much about the politics of race and sexuality and gender, but there’s always a playfulness to it. Like “Stay On It” – to me, half of that piece is extremely playful. The first time I heard it, a friend described it to me as sounding like a kid hanging on a xylophone.
I remember being in my undergrad doing this whole composers seminar on Ligeti, and we would just start cracking up, because some of the sound choices are so brutal that they come off almost as funny. There’s this hilarity to it in the extremity. A lot of more popular recent experimental music has lost sight of that, and it’s something Wendy and I are very much into and want to have more of. Especially, I think, there’s not a lot of it with queer non-male artists, so both of us really wanted to try and focus on something that has a lightheartedness about it.
Wendy and I improvise together a lot because we live together. When you play music for as long as both of us have, you tend to get into a place where it’s just work. The two of us have been making an effort to jam for a while and wind up in some pretty fun territories, going back to this idea of really experimenting, because that’s something that gets lost a lot too. We need less all-black frowning aesthetic, and more stoner goofball attitude. There will be something with Wendy and I on Residence in late April, and there will be a lot of pretty fried jams on that. (laughs)
more eaze’s sentence structure in the country is out now on Thrill Jockey.