More Eaze - valley and structure (2026)

Going back to her roots, mari rubio returns to the ostinato techniques that first spurred her interest in composition when she was a child, revisiting old tracks and bringing along Wendy Eisenberg, Sammy Weissberg, Nora Stanley, Jade Guterman and Conner Simmons along for the ride.

rubio's always been hard to pin down. Her early output as more eaze was often lumped in with the contemporary ambient set, but that's been harder to reconcile as time has gone on. An in-demand producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist who's worked with Chanel Beads, Faye Webster and Space Afrika to drop just a few names, her solo records have provided space for her wildest inclinations to flourish. Only earlier this year she debuted on Thrill Jockey with 'sentence structure in the country', an album of bedchamber pop that referenced post-rock, Americana and the 20th century minimalists all at once. With 'valley and structure', the songs disappear underneath her circumspect instrumentation; concentrating on repeating phrases that open up the opportunity to counterbalance with additional elements that mutate, echoes of her previous record remain, swept into longer, weirder meditations.

rubio started work on the album as she was putting the finishing touches on its predecessor and if you listen carefully to 'i'm in the structure', you can just about make out the remnants of 'the producer'. Because as the titles suggest, the music is attempting to draw our ears towards the very concept of structure - what we think we know and what rubio cares to show us. As such, it's music that feels as if its locked into the same continuum as Jim O'Rourke's Roeg trilogy, deconstructing and reconstructing American folk and pop structures with no small amount of love for the subject matter. The album's centerpiece is the 20-minute 'once you say yes to the structure, you never get out', and it's among rubio's most rewarding compositions, filled to the brim with her usual hallmarks - AutoTuned vocal hooks, nods to folk, ambient and avant-classical - but arranged with a rare complexity that's part Philip Glass, part Van Dyke Parks and part Morton Feldman.