‘an afternoon whine’ is the first release for Ecstatic by claire rousay and mari maurice aka more eaze - it offers a highly personalised conception of ephemeral avant-pop by two of the US experimental scenes most insightful operators; collapsing ambient, electro-acoustic and gauzy guitar shimmers into a shared, lucid dreamworld. Feeling like a milestone in both artist’s prolific catalogues, the album’s heady drift finds our collaborators recording in the same room for the first time, diffusing a palette of vocals, guitar, field recordings, piano and violin into a singular sort of etheric chamber pop. Beautifully frayed at the edges and with a sanguine melodic core, their music evolves and resolves from the nanoscopic through to a panoramic view across its five pieces, with melodic motifs and lowkey vocals that occur with uncannily natural logic and quiet wit. The results are Budd-like in their slow blooming elegance, but elusive as anything from the neo-ambient spheres of uon or Perila et al, and osmotically influenced by R&B and cloudrap as much as indie-pop proper. ‘an afternoon whine’ is best framed as a warts-n-all snapshot, poetically limning a sort of day in the life of rousay & eaze, replete with the domestic rustles and ephemeral passages that have made the former’s work so spellbinding, and glinting with the kind of memory-jogging motifs that give body to more eaze’s explorations of electro-acoustic sketches, identity, and perception. It’s hard to think of another duo who’ve smudged the borders so subtly and expressively between the flushing toilet and piano spritz of ‘Great Song’ and the heartfelt autotuned paean of ‘Smaller Pools,’ and with the ability to subliminally unstitch convention and reweave it in their own image, as with the lush tension and imperceptible room transitions of ‘Floor Pt. 3,’ or how ‘Songs For A Tuned Guitar’ reclaims the supernatural from the domestic with such poetic guile. • Ecstatic debut by claire rousay and mari maurice aka more eaze • Collapsing ambient, electro-acoustic and gauzy guitar shimmers into a shared, lucid dreamworld • RIYL Aaron Cartier, Malibu, Grouper, Perila, Luc Ferrari, Gastr del Sol • Mastered by Alessio Natalizia • Cover photograph by Grace Herndon • Vinyl edition of 250 copies