As More Eaze, the composer and producer Mari Rubio has quietly become one of American experimental music’s most explorative and prolific contemporary artists. Her collaborations and contributions to others’ music are correctly lauded; from her work with her partner Wendy Eisenberg as whait to her records with emo-ambient star Claire Rousay, Rubio’s approach is versatile but distinctively hers, and although those collaborations often yield superb results, this unique voice is never clearer than in her solo work. Her new album valley and structure is her second of 2026 to be released by Chicago label Thrill Jockey, following March’s sentence structure in the country. Packaged with a printed book of scores for each piece on the record, it’s an intricate, reflective work of subtle minimalism, free jazz-inflected exploration and avant-folk indeterminacy, as carefully constructed as it is organic and fluid. TMR spoke to Rubio in a gap in her hectic touring, teaching and recording schedule to discuss the album’s composition, her approach to playing live, and the gathering momentum of her career in leftfield sound. 

Hi Mari, it’s great to meet you and congratulations on the album. You’re off on tour very soon: how are you preparing?

I'm actually having to kind of prepare-slash-chill day. I have to get prepared for a short UK tour I'm about to do with my partner. It’s been a crazy week: yesterday was the first week of the semester at the university I teach at. I'm just teaching one class this semester and then have a bunch of private students, but I also had a show last night, and then today I need to make a couple little tweaks to some stuff for my set. Half the shows are with my duo with my partner called whait. (In some places) I’m doing a solo set and Wendy (Eisenberg) is doing a surprise solo set. 

It’s a big year for touring for me: I have never toured this much in my life. I guess two albums and lots of collaboration might lead to that; it’s all sort of taken off. It’s a great problem to have, but I’m like, ‘Oh my god, how am I going to do all this?’

Yeah, things have really seemed to move for you this year: how have you found this increase in attention and commitments? It’s been pretty busy – maybe a bit frantic?

Yeah, I would say busy and frantic are a couple of words I would use to describe this year. I mean, it's also been very rewarding. I've had a lot of opportunities this year that are things that I truly couldn't have even fathomed just even a couple of years ago. I've gotten to do a lot of remix work that is  that has both come out or is coming out with some heroes of mine, like the guys in Animal Collective. It's sort of surreal because it's also like I feel I'm very much living my childhood dream, but it's just also been so hectic that at times it's a little bit hard to appreciate that or enjoy that as much as I'd like to. But when I do have those moments to rest and pull back, it has been nice to have that reflection. When you love what you do and it's music, it's very easy to just kind of be like, ‘Sure, I'll do that too, I can take this on, I can take that on.’ But it's like then you get on tour and it’s not very restful. I have to do a lot of work and a lot of logistics coordinating: this is the first year I’ve decided to dedicate some vacation time to my schedule.

You’ve released two albums with Thrill Jockey this year, after working with lots of different underground labels previously. How has it been to work with a label with depth of reputation and heritage?

It's been amazing. I initially got in touch with Thrill Jockey because Claire Rousay and I did a duo record for them in 2025 [No Floor]. And that alone, I was thrilled by: I have a release with my name on on Thrill Jockey, a label that I have admired since I was a teenager and followed since being in high school. When Bettina [Richards], the head of the label, approached me about doing a solo record I was pretty ecstatic. 

I really love and have been deeply influenced by so many artists that are on Thrill Jockey. I'd say a lot of that music is stuff that I would consider a big pillar of my work. It's also been great because it feels like there's a sense of permanence of working with them. Previously, I've worked with a lot of great labels, but I've kind of hopped around a lot: this album might seem like this is a good project for this label, this one might be a good project for this label. But it's nice sort of being able to have more of a permanent home with Thrill Jockey, just some folks who are kind of down to at hear out ideas I have for releases. I was really so stoked and also kind of shocked that they were so down to do this more limited edition scale record [valley and structure]. To be able to release something else in the same year feels very significant, but also to do it on a smaller scale physically and have it be more of the special thing that comes with like a score and other stuff. These are not always the easiest conversations to broach, but when I pitched it to Bettina, she was just like, ‘Yeah, sounds good, we can do that in the fall.’ Being able to actually talk about a project like that in advance is something I've never really experienced before. Usually it's like, ‘Oh, I have this finished record – would you want to work with me on putting it out?’ 

Can you talk a little bit more about the origins of this record, and its relationship with the one from earlier in the year?

So this record started out basically around the time I'd finished sentence structure in the country. I had started playing shows with a larger ensemble of people from New York; I haven't really managed to find a way to take that on the road yet, which I would love to figure out.  AsI was playing these shows, I was trying to write  a set of pieces that were kind of growing out of [previous solo record] lacuna and parlor: taking some of the same ideas, but expanding them, refining them, making them a little bit more composed in some context. And we were playing a mix of a piece from lacuna and parlor, a song or two from sentence structure in the country, and then these [newly developed] pieces. sentence structure in the country is more of a record about breaking a song: taking a song that could be played just on acoustic guitar or something and figuring out how it can be rearranged and restructured through a studio process.

With this album [what’s wrong with the structure] the idea of the song is a lot more emergent. We’re setting these processes in motion and then the form of the song develops out of that. I feel it's very much in dialogue with sentence structure in that way, and that they're two sides of the same coin. I feel like a big question of a lot of my work as More Eaze is, at what point does a song come to exist out of something else? This album is very much a confrontation with that, but they all are also tied to sentence structure. [For example, on the new album] track four is actually just the song ‘the producer’ from sentence structure, rearranged in this more minimalist type of fashion. That was just something that developed out of me performing those pieces live after the record came out, figuring out other shapes they could take. Some of it is a matter of practicality: a lot of times on tour, I'm just taking a violin and an electronic setup, so I should probably figure out how to play this song or do some arrangement of it that is just like a solo violin thing. Perhaps unsurprisingly one of my favourite records is World of Echo by Arthur Russell, and I kind of see that version of ‘the producer’ in the same style as that.

Yeah, I feel like these two records are sort of in conversation with each other while still very much being their own separate entities: two ways of looking at the same thing. Listening to the records side-by-side, you can hear that dialogue. 

Something that I really love about a lot of your records is that there’s a clear sense of a well-considered conceptual framework: an idea of a song or piece that has still has life and spontaneity in it, but does have this kind of preconceived logic underneath. I’m thinking of the patterns of repetition and layering, or as you mentioned earlier, the idea of setting certain processes in motion and seeing where they lead; you even mention ‘structure’ in your album titles. How conscious of that are you when you’re actually writing and composing? Do you come up with some kind of schema for how you want to do something, or do you let things emerge more organically than that? 

It really depends. I would say a lot of times it happens more organically and then about halfway through working on something, I'm like, ‘Oh, this is what's going on.’ And then at that point, I might be a little bit more conscious of how I'm approaching something.

I realised on this album that everything was based around the idea of an ostinato: at least one repeating thing that occurs throughout the whole song and just changes ever so slightly. These pieces were all written over the last year so I was not really aware that they all shared that theme – it was just what I was interested in at the time – and it very naturally grew out of some of the other work I had done that was more chamber-focused. All of a sudden, as I started recording them, I'm like, ‘Oh, all of these tracks are doing the same thing, asking the same question in a different way.’

You’re classically trained, but also grew up playing improv and open-mic nights, jamming with jazz and country bands as well as classical ensembles. How did these experiences, which arguably contradict each other in certain ways, shape your practice today?

I'm a big believer that you kind of can't escape any any of your influences. That's something I talk to a lot of my students about because I don't think that they I think that a lot of times, especially younger songwriters and composers don't really think too much about what that means to yeah, to be influenced by something and how that or their background and how that kind of seeps out through their work. It's something I am kind of obsessed with constantly of how that transference takes place and how all of a sudden you see something that, you know, you may not even be conscious of manifesting itself in how you write or how you compose.

A lot of my background in playing folk music and doing these more sort of jam things, I've always been much more interested in the idea of having things that were open and not super fixed. And so with all of these pieces, and even with the songs on sentence structure, there’s very much this idea of a song not being fixed in a particular way, which is how a lot of people I grew up playing with would approach playing a country song or a folk song. I can remember sitting in with people playing their own very specific version of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’: every honky-tonk band plays that song, and you’re like, okay, they do a lot of the same moves, but maybe they’ll open this part up a little bit more, change the phrasing here. I think that seeing that at such a young age is something that has been deeply impactful on all of the music I've made throughout my life. I’m super comfortable in the minimalism or post-minimalism world, but I’m always interested in whatever takes this less formal, more open-ended approach.

Could you name any artists, composers or ensembles who combine those elements of classical composition with that open-ended approach in ways you find particularly inspirational? 

I'm a huge Julius Eastman fan, and then there's an ensemble in New York City called TAK, who do great stuff. I work with members of that ensemble from time to time in a free improv context. The JACK Quartet always does great work. Composers that I really love and I would say to have been very influential would be… a lot of Franco Battiato’s more minimalist works; Anthony Moore from Slap Happy; I love the composer Cassandra Miller a lot – I think that she is just a genius and someone who is really taking this idea of exploring folk song to its logical conclusion within the chamber music world. All of that stuff has been super huge for me. Early Penguin Cafe Orchestra music and early Gavin Briars is really, really big for me, because that's music where it's there's still a pretty large degree of improvisation and interpretation. How varied each performance becomes is always very fascinating.

valley and structure, the new album from More Eaze, is out 9th October via Thrill Jockey. She is on tour across the UK until the end of the year.