High Places
By Sophie in High Places | 0 comments
MP3: From Stardust to Sentience
MP3: New Grace (from Mistletonia)
High Places are two in number. Mary Pearson and Rob Barber create a unique and joyous union of world beat, dance music and underground pop. They draw inspiration from returning to the basics of sound, like its pitch, position, speed and presence. This template for experimentation allows the band to build otherworldly polyrhythmic miniatures from small drums, bells and shakers, clouded by blankets of echo and reverb. Their most thunderous heart-thumping impulses are juxtaposed with a spacious (almost peaceful) atmosphere. Rob’s percussion sounds chime and flutter around Mary’s sweetly honest vocal, layered to the point that her lyrics often become as veiled and hypnotic as the other instruments. Their new self-titled debut is out now on Mistletone and Thrill Jockey.
”Part of a second wave of freak folkers emerging from the American underground… (High Places) arrive at a nutty playfulness that isn’t scared to incorporate electronics alongside folk instrumentation, or to infuse shamanistic hoedowns with potent lines of melody.”
- THE AUSTRALIAN (four stars)
“High Places’ debut glimmers with fragmented and unfixed beauty.”
- THE BIG ISSUE (four stars)
“Good vibes and child-like innocence… a record that will appeal to both a little kid’s sense of fun and a big kid’s sense of adventure”
- mX NEWSPAPER (four & a half stars)
About High Places
Mary and Rob met while Mary was completing a music degree in bassoon performance and Rob was working in visual art, teaching lithography and etching at an art school. Both were performing as solo musicians at the time. Mary relocated to New York from Michigan in late spring 2006, and the two soon after began collaborating under the name High Places.The name refers to a place where one has a better vantage point and can gain broader perspective; it references a love for mountains, rooftops, and of course metaphorical “high places.”
The duo has an “exquisite corpse” style of songwriting where they exchange ideas back and forth, challenging one another’s expectations, pushing songs to new places, or more aptly, new heights. They began by releasing a number of singles as well as contributing songs to a few compilations. These early and varied works were collected and released in July of 2008 as 03/07-09/07 on Mistletone in Australia and New Zealand, and Thrill Jockey in the rest of the world.
Since inception, High Places has created a signature sound out of using bass-heavy, yet crisp beats, lilting vocal melodies, syncopated rhythmic lines performed on folk percussion instruments, guitar duets turned into treated samples, and percussive lines created from the manipulation of household objects. The songwriting is expansive and fluid, all the while managing to be concise. Overall, the compositions are settled and assured. High Places gravitates toward the organic over the electronic, and that natural aesthetic adds warmth and intimacy to the recordings.
In a live setting, the band creates their layered recordings with Mary singing and simultaneously manipulating her vocals with various delay and reverb pedals, while playing some hand percussion, recorders, and creating and controlling various loops. Rob handles the drums triggering a variety of percussive sounds with his drum pads, as well as playing hand percussion, wooden blocks with contact mics, and singing some ambient vocals.
High Places’ self-titled debut was recorded by Rob and Mary in their apartment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood between January and May of 2008. They employed a wide variety of instruments to make this album ranging from the more traditional: 12 string guitar, banjo, shakers and rattles, bass, bells and Kalimba, to the inventive: plastic bags, mixing bowls, wood blocks and other common household objects.
The album has a contemplative and organic lyrical tone emphasized by the themes of goodness manifested in nature, hardship and wonder as necessities to human existence and growth. Additionally, the idea of maturation and development is further accented through the recurring mention of trees and their extending, enveloping branches.
Rob created the High Places artwork by using photos taken by both band members. The images are drawn from nature but all have a subtle, mystical, “golden” motif, a fitting frame for the album’s recurring themes. This can best be summed up by the words to “Gold Coin,” a song that was inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:
The ocean is your god-self
The sun is your god-self
God as air
Part of you is man
Part of you is god-self
The rest is just stumbling in the mist
Has it really only been three short years that High Places have been honing their unique, genre-traversing style? From their intimate home recordings has emerged a groundswell of praise and international recognition for an exciting sound that blends the best elements of dream pop and the bubbling energy of tribal dance.
For all the accolades and buzz however, the greatest compliment you could pay the duo’s percussive maestro Rob Barber is to be utterly dumbfounded by the music they make.
“I do like the idea of it being quietly confusing. I like it when people feel confused by the structures of the music or whatever, like when I get that response I think it’s cool because at least they walk away thinking about it.”
The heights of success and buzz in the music industry can be fraught with danger - as their self-titled debut release simultaneously enveloped critics and won new legions of fans last year, you could be forgiven for presuming it might have all gone to the pair’s heads. Yet it quickly becomes clear that for the newly re-located LA team it hasn’t changed their modest yet diverse approach to making music.
“I mean it’s sort of surreal, you get caught up in touring and playing shows it’s hard to have much perspective on it,” vocalist Mary Pearson explains. “But yeah I think we’re just excited about all the places it takes us, like literally we get to go to new places.”
New places such as Australia, where the group are thrilled to be making their first trip in a matter of days as part of Mistletone’s Summer Tones festival, and touring with electro-pop enigma Dan Deacon.
“Oh totally, I mean I’ve always wanted to go there, I think ever since I was a kid and I saw ‘Priscilla Queen Of The Desert’,” Barber enthuses. “Maybe that’s totally cheesy for you guys but like it’s a really good portrayal of the country and the visuals on the way out to the rock.”
If you needed a tip for your High Places outfit I think Rob just gave you the cue to dust off your wigs, prepare your makeup and shine your sequins. Likewise if you’ve got any chocolates lying around perhaps you could help Mary out on her quest: “I’ve heard a lot about Violet Crumbles. I’m vegan so I won’t be having any but I’ll bring lots back for my boyfriend.”
Transcending genres and being consistently surprising both live and in the studio is what keeps the duo going, and considering their vast brand of experimental pop maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that at times it can be unlikely sources that spur their creative minds.
“Sometimes I’ll even nerd out and be like ‘oh man there’s this kick drum beat on a death metal record that I like totally love’ and I’ll try to copy it,” Barber indulges. “You know, we can get influenced by bands and music that sound nothing like us… like we toured with No Age last time, we’ve known them since before either of our bands existed. For a completely rocking punk band they have a lot of dynamics going on in their music and I think that’s just fine.”
For everyone that has immersed themselves in their recorded materials, get ready to be blown away by the live show hitting our shores. In the spirit of stunning experimentation and blurring boundaries, the High Places live experience is something that transcends the record and brings a whole new dynamic to their already brimming music. Despite the often gentle nature of their debut album, there’s an obvious undercurrent of rich percussive texture and tribal dance beats, and Barber assures fans that these come to the forefront on stage.
“We like to be really loud… we just kind of like how it comes across, almost like more dancey, more like dancehall music or something like that. Plus I think people don’t expect it, you know? I think that it’s like having something live that’s pretty different from the record.”
High Places have never been ones to take it easy over their short history, and the exciting news for fans is that it seems 2009 will be no different, as Barber explains.
“We just finished a split 12″ that’s coming out on a label called DPM and that’s with Soft Circle who we’re actually touring with right now… And we’re probably going to take the summer off from touring because we’ve been touring pretty non-stop. So we’re probably going to take most of the summer off to write a new record.” So keep your eyes and ears peeled as Barber and Pearson’s signature sounds negotiate the globe, amazing and befuddling listeners one by one.
Nick Peters
Experimental pop duo HIGH PLACES have rapidly scaled the ladder of the indie pantheon in the last year or so. MARY PEARSON talks to MICHAEL PINCOTT about ‘exquisite corpse’ songwriting and the joys of touring.
The music of High Places is dreamy, playful and innocent. Pearson’s voice, simple and endearing, forms a fabric with the ambiguous sounds and syncopated percussion of partner in crime Rob Barber. The instrumentation mixes organic with electronic, seamlessly blurring the borders between the two. The percussion especially stands out, with Pearson’s voice the final glue to bind it all together. The combination clearly works, with both their self titled of last year and 03/07-09/07 (a release gathering loose ends) receiving warm critical reception. On top of that High Places have toured relentlessly since their inception, not that Pearson is complaining.
“It’s pretty nice, the other day I was thinking, ‘It’s so cool that I get to go out and do shows every night.’ I forget to be grateful for that. To be able to write songs and perform them and pay your rent with that, to get to travel and go to new places is amazing.”
Having recently broken into the shiny new year of 2009, I ask Pearson whether she formed any New Year’s resolutions.
“I tend to make resolutions on my birthday or when we get off tour. Usually on the road you think about all the things you want to do when you get home. My current resolution is about all the things I want to cook when I get home. I don’t always eat that great on tour. I’m thinking about making vegetable stock when I get home so I can make a bunch of soup.”
Another challenge of being on the road is working on new material in a less than ideal setting, an alien motel room or cramped van. But it’s a situation Pearson and Barber are coming to terms with.
“We’re still trying to figure it out. It’s always tricky to have any degree of normalcy in your life when you’re on tour. I’ve started making video stuff on the road and we’re slowly learning how to work on music on the road too. When we were home in January we finished up a recording for a split twelve-inch with Soft Circle. We’ll be back home in a couple of months for a break and we’ll start working on our new record then.”
High Places’ creative process has been described previously by the band as ‘exquisite corpse’ songwriting. Not entirely sure what to make of the phrase, I ask Pearson to expand on their songwriting philosophy.
“The idea behind High Places is that we both make visual art and music, so the way we approach making music is visual in a way; we think a lot about colours and textures. The exquisite corpse idea is that we trade ideas back and forth, always throwing the other person for a loop with what we come up with. I think we’re such different people that we approach everything from a different perspective. I’ll hear something Rob has done and change it in a way he didn’t see coming and so at the end of the day we have this recording that’s a total surprise, it doesn’t really sound like either one of us.”
The Australian review (four stars):
Big Issue review (four stars):
Inpress review:
Praise for 03/07-09/07 (singles collection):
Cyclic Defrost review:
Brooklyn based duo High Places make spaced out drugged up music, a homemade scattered almost childish smattering of accidents that when you put them all together sound rather warm and endearing. It’s music that doesn’t hold structure high on its agenda, rather the music seems to just evolve, these echoing, delayed washes of sound crafted by hitting or shaking whatever’s is sight. It‘s dinky and cute, with a real DIY feel, glockenspiel, treated guitars, and vaguely disinterested homemade beats. Mary Pearson’s vocals are the only element with any conviction, though used sparingly, often seemingly used to stop the music from floating away entirely. It really is a unique proposition and High Places gentle oddness offers up audio that creates a kind of lazy lethargic fog in the listener which is always welcome. 03/07 - 09/07 is a compilation of their singles and tracks from various compilations possibly from between those dates and there is definitely a unity in the material and an impish haphazard charm that it impossible not to be seduced by.
By Bob Baker Fish
Three Thousand review:
Day tripping Brooklyn duo High Places thoroughly enchant on this singles collection - released locally through Mistletone. Sun-bleached, dreamy and unfolding with a stream-of-consciousness feel, these songs assume weird back-and-forth shapes; their tropical-tinged samples and faraway vocals rolling into themselves with the certainty of waves. Nothing seems intent on beginning or ending, but instead - like the short, impressionistic novellas of self-discovery favored in maudlin youth - all tracks roll out as a deepening trip into members Mary Pearson and Robert Barber’s private imaginary world.
Insofar as they conjure an elevated, top-of-the head kind of affect, there’s something in High Places’ approach akin to My Bloody Valentine’s famed ‘dry’ production aesthetic. But while the latter go dense and maximal to swirl your head, Barber and Pearson’s relaxed programming and wonder-infused lyricism is light, stripped-back and weightless. Shakers, xylophone, steel drum, tweaked kitchen recordings and Pearson’s breezy voice combine as an escapist scheme approaching out-of-body experience. This pair are the sound of sun-baking lovers, intoxicated, post-coital, on perpetual island holiday.
High Places interview by Richard MacFarlane:
How did you guys get started?
Rob: Mary was living in Michigan and we met through a mutual friend while she was visiting NYC. We instantly clicked. We became email and late-night phone call friends, and a couple weeks after meeting she set up a house show in Kalamazoo for my solo band, the Urxed, and my tourmates Matt and Kim. We decided to make music together through the mail, and tour together a few months later, but as solo projects. She moved to NY right before tour, and at the last minute we discovered how well our song making worked together. So we emailed everyone, and said “Hey, we are a band now”. I came up with a few really bad names, that probably still have ghostship myspace accounts with zero friends.
In terms of pouring a lot of time into the songs you make, is it just because yr perfectionists, or do you have a particular interest in art that is obviously worked on for a long time?
Rob: We are sort of perfectionists, but only because when you have a ton of parts mixing together, you have to be so it doesn’t sound terrible and muddy. Getting everything to blend and gel well is tricky sometimes. On the other hand, some of our better received songs came together very fast. I think our visual art side definitely influences our aesthetic sound. I want to score a film soooo bad!
Mary: My solo project was all about immediacy and minimalism, so High Places is certainly a departure from that. Occasionally we overwork a song and there’s just way too much going on, but for the most part, all the layers of sounds come together to form this new, unexpected thing.
Yr music seems to have a loving sort of touch; a strong idea of ‘craft’ or ‘homemade’. Is this something that’s important?
Rob: We enjoy making a lot of randomly unrelated parts and throwing them together in a big bowl and seeing what happens. Then we sort of obsess over the crafting of song structures. It can be a lot less fun when we are going over recordings of plastic bags being crumpled, trying to make them into something warm and familiar, but when we are successful, we are always pleasantly surprised. It’s like working on a puzzle, not knowing what it will be and then suddenly there it is in front of you. Or playing Wheel of Fortune. We don’t really buy a lot of vowels though.
At the same time, there’s a big element of like, the ‘whatever’ in yr music; really carefree and childlike. It seems to celebrate that sort of joyousness and haphazardness.
Mary: A lot of that really has to do with the way we record. We are okay with recording vocals when I have a bad cold and only a four-note range, we’re okay with the cats meowing or brushing up on the computer while we’re recording. So even though we are meticulous about the overall end product, we also leave a lot of the process up to chance.
Rob: It’s more like boredom with recognizable instrumentation. The haphazardness is definitely fun in the initial stage of trial and error, like seeing what sounds end up doing what. It can get overwhelming though. We have hard drives and and hard drives of archived sounds we have made, and our organization isn’t always the best. Sometimes it’s like “what folder was that one rhythm track in? The one with the clang-y thing-y?”
What instruments do you use to make all those sounds?
Rob: Well, we do often use regular old instruments, I like using my twelve string acoustic guitar, and Mary likes wind instruments. We feel pretty comfortable improvising together with them because that is what we historically play. But we record them in odd, non-pro ways, and multitrack the heck out them. Aside from that, we use krinkly things like paper and plastic bags, lots of kitchen items, metal bowls in particular. Anything that grabs our attention, really. Also lots of random percussion do-dads. Mostly it’s how we arrange it all that makes it unclear as to what the source sounds are. Also how we record and things like proximity to the mic and room tone are major factors.
With the DIY scene, well, I’m not sure what it’s like in Brooklyn but in Australia, there’s this real gravitation towards the noisy, that no wave sort of stuff that is really anti-musician. It negates the need for sincerity or emotion in favour of aesthetics, whereas you guys have a fun, poppy and carefree sort of vibe but seem to fit into a big DIY thing.
Rob: Yeah, it is like that here a lot as well. But the scene is incredibly diverse too. Nobody really sounds similar here. It’s pretty all over the place, and everyone gets along. There aren’t really genre divisions. It’s more about a mutual commonality and intent. Honestly, I think the bigger picture is more of a universal scene that we see happening, and feel part of. For example, our friend Lucky Dragons just did a split 5″ with a guy from Greenland called Goodiepal.
Mary: For a minute I think we considered making more of a pretty noise band or something, but ultimately, we both love melodies and feeling like there is some sort of human connection with the audience.
You mentioned in an interview re: Brooklyn scene “I just feel like we filled a void that was missing at the time, and that was just kind of an accident.”; do you feel like you would have been received differently somewhere else?
Rob: I think that if we lived in LA, people would’ve been totally stoked. At the time NY was for the most part a pretty aggressive sounding music scene. I guess you had Matt and Kim, but they are still a punk band. It all just kind of goes with the territory, I guess. When we started we were channeling some pretty heart-on-your-sleave vibe-age, bordering on being corny. We wanted to basically create a warmer, beachy-er environment. Escapist almost. We thought that the bar was raised so high for extreme and experimental music, particularly after Lightning Bolt, that we felt like to be punk, the only place to go was to be friendly and positive, and see how many people would get irritated by it. Not that we were at war with NY, we loved the scene and bands here, but we wanted to make some sort of impact on the way people thought about experimental music. Ultimately, we failed, because NYC surprised us and was very accepting and open to what we were doing.
So I’ve never seen you live but apparently it’s really loud? It seems hard to imagine in a way, I’ve always listened to yr music on headphones or at home on the stereo, not mega loud, it just seems like a more quiet/personal/insular sort of sound to me.
Mary: It’s important to us for everything to be really balanced so the samples match the volume of the live percussion, vocals, etc. We often use our own PA of four pretty massive speaker cabinets and we don’t use monitors, so part of the reason things get so loud is just so we can hear ourselves behind the speakers!
Rob: Well, we are super influenced by hip hop, and dance hall and club music, particularly how it sounds acoustically, bumping out of a car parked 100 meters away in the gas station parking lot at 2am. Plus when you are playing with bands like Lightning Bolt, you gotta keep up, or you disappear. Plus the way bass and bouncing panning percussive sound hits you can be so much fun!
Do you guys listen to a fair bit of hardcore/punk sort of stuff or do I have that wrong? So you haven’t always made these liquidy sounding pop songs?
Rob: I grew up on punk and hardcore, and I still love a lot of it. I don’t really follow the current scene though. I’m more historically attached to it. I always listened to a ton of different music though. It’s just that growing up, punk and hardcore was the most immediate forum for underground music. I was also very influenced by it in regards to personal/consumer politics.
Mary: We have a side project punk band in the works. I play bass and Rob plays guitar.
(What sort of stuff do you listen to?)
Rob: Everything! Seriously! It’s all important!
Mary: Right now we have the new Thank You record on. I’ve been listening to Brian Eno and the Boredoms a lot.
The track name ‘Banana Slugs’ seems to me a perfect way to describe the way it sounds; well, I’m thinking of this slug in a story by Arthur Bradford (from Dogwalking: Short Stories where there is this fluorescent slug they find in the glovebox of an abandoned car. Its like, a cute slug. Not a gross one.
Mary: When I was a little girl, I saw a slug for the first time at my aunt’s house in Seattle. Up until that point, I thought slugs were on par with unicorns or something. I was so excited to see one in real life! In Northern California, they have these slugs called banana slugs that are aptly named. They are yellow with brown spots, and we saw a bunch hanging out on redwood trees. “Shared Islands” actually is very inspired by a John Berger book Here Is Where We Meet. The part “It only goes without saying that this includes shared islands, twilights, deserts, seas, the deer of Nara, some books and engravings” is taken from a dedication by Jorge Luis Borges to his wife.
With a website like Pitchforkmedia giving you positive reviews, have you found this has changed much for you guys? In terms of maybe how you fit into the Brooklyn scene or just generally?
Rob: There is no doubt Pitchfork and other websites have helped us enormously outside of our town, particularly outside of the US. We appreciate so much all the time people spend writing and discussing music. It seems like a much more democratic way of communicating and finding out about music. It’s crazy that with all the music out there, that these people actually found us! We have toured the US extensively, but internationally, we have only played Mexico so far. The Brooklyn scene seems perhaps less reliant on the internet, because so much is happening right in front of you. I think playing out live is what people remember us for here, to the point that we actually got a reputation of maybe playing too much for a while, mostly because out of town friends were coming though, and would be asking us to play. Promoter Todd P is basically the lifeline to all that is rad in Brooklyn. Manhattan tends to be a bit different and has more of an “industry” vibe, people who make and follow blogs, or write about music for a living, or just out of love. It also has a lot of college kids. That crowd seems much more informed by the internet, but it is equally enjoyable to play to new people.
Do you feel any pressure to put this album out? Or do you feel affected by medias in working on songs for it?
Rob: Well, to further confound the “where’s their full length?” What label are they on?” questions, we have yet another 7″ and split 7″ with Xiu Xiu both coming out any day now. We are making a full length at our own cautious pace because we see it as growing into something new. How do you construct a good album? What makes the whole thing interact and flow with itself? We made our 7″ more like mini albums, and I guess we are learning how to stretch that out to album length. That is what we are figuring out right now, and we don’t really want to be on a schedule about it. That ruins the fun.
Do you play many house shows and things like that (as opposed to music venues)
Rob: It really depends on the town. Some towns such as Brooklyn, Baltimore and Denver have amazing diy spaces, so playing a club is actually a bad choice. Oakland only has diy stuff. Some clubs are cool, and others are scary and uncomfortable. You just need to have a good ear to the ground to find out what’s happening in any given town. We actually play in an art context fairly often too. Basically we like to mix it up, just to learn new things and keep it all fresh.
In terms of the new album, do you find yr approaching songs differently so they fit into an album context?
Mary: I think our writing process has naturally evolved into making longer, more complete sounding songs. In the beginning, we were so worried about people getting bored with our ideas, we often just chopped songs off at the two minute mark. We’re learning to give the songs time to grow.
Do you have any broader ideas in terms of this album? I mean, what are you going to try and do on the record?
Rob: We have been trying different ideas like a repeating or re-ocurring idea. Also blending the songs so they seem linked in a way.
Mary: The songs feel a bit more meditative or introspective, but still loud and dance-y. I guess the lyrics are more meditative and introspective, and the beats are dance-y. We’re also making the recordings relate more to our live, slightly more raucous sound.
There’s the polyrhythmic thing going on with yr songs; do you have any interest in that? I’ve been listening to quite a bit of African sort of music lately, ‘Graceland’, and also Arthur Russell was really into that I think. And now Panda Bear and a few others get on that vibe too
Rob: We actually think about it heavily. I love the idea that different people will pick up on different patterns and hopefully will groove on it in a more personalized way. The more rhythm based Moondog songs pull that off really well. I think we aren’t very academic with our “non-western” (for a lack of a better term) influences, and I think we confuse them a lot when we unconsciously and inevitably channel them. So it all blends. Luckily this works to our advantage more often than not.
Mary: One of my teachers in music school had some really awesome mnemonic devices to help us remember polyrhythmic patterns. I think my favorite is “pass the gosh darn ketchup,” which helps you remember 4 against 3. There’s a lot of passing the gosh darn ketchup in our songs.
What’s next after the album?
Rob: We are touring a tonne this summer, mostly as support (Deerhunter in Europe, and No Age in the US) and some festivals. The record will come out in September, when we will then tour the US more extensively, as well as trip over to Australia and (hopefully) New Zealand via our Australian label homies Mistletone Records.
High Places article by Michaella Solar-March:
email this | tag this | digg this | trackback | comment RSS feed