more eaze's 'valley and structure' Is a Hypnotic Masterpiece of the Patient Ostinato
The Sonic Breakdown
mari rubio has said the whole record traces back to one childhood discovery: “I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ostinato in music… I felt like I unlocked some forbidden secret as a child when I first discovered that a bassline or melodic figure could stay the same while other elements reharmonized or changed around it.” valley and structure is five tracks of that secret being tested in public, with a live ensemble inside it.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Conner Simmons on upright and Sammy Weissberg on electric bass hold three of the five tracks between them, and the mix — rubio’s own, mastered by Andrew Weathers — keeps both basses distinct rather than blending them. The twenty-minute “once you say yes to the structure, you never get out” opens on “an almost glitching rhythmic pattern, gradually phasing as an extra eighth note is added to the figure,” then lets the ensemble drone as longer notes arrive.
The Spatial Dynamics: Recorded and engineered with andréa schiavelli, the room reads as a real room. Track four, “i’m in the structure,” is a rebuild of an earlier piece stripped “to its core and then dubbed out,” keeping the ostinato as a repeating violin arpeggio over “the occasional drone and scrape of a drum machine.”
Standout Performance
Nora Stanley, on saxophone, clarinet and flute across tracks two, three and five. Stanley is the voice that makes the reharmonization audible — the element that keeps arriving with new information while the figure beneath her stays put.
Why It’s Certified
Treble’s Adam P. Newton found the warmth under the theory: “I never thought I would use the term post-structuralism to describe a powerful piece of music, but here we are,” and crucially, “the warmth on display keeps it far away from sounding like a graduate level dissertation.” AllMusic’s Paul Simpson notes the album “is based on live performances, and it focuses on repetition and harmonization.” rubio’s own framing of where this sits next to March’s sentence structure in the country: “Where sentence structure tears and rebuilds, valley and structure branches out.”