A lovely interview I from months ago on Dazed's ticket. Really, really cool band, and a really sweet couple:
High Places are really sick of fighting. "Everything extreme you can think of has already been done. Like if you want to see someone fucking vomit on the floor and beat their fists, you can, but it's done man," says Robert Barber. Rob plays nearly all of the instruments live in High Places, and Mary Pearson sings over the top, though that division doesn't stick in the studio. They're a really nice art-folk duo who live in flat in Brooklyn with their cats and sound like every song you've ever heard played backwards all at once.
They've played warehouses and split singles with Xiu Xiu and blown up The Smell with No Age. (Rob: "Everyone expects linked bands to be like mini-versions: people can't believe we're friends. But we love playing to new ears."). Pearson's a Michiganer who studied classical music and does projects about minimalism and immediacy and plays the bassoon. Barber grew up taking the Saturday train to New York to go skateboarding and studied printmaking at art school and designs some of their awesome covers with Pearson, like the red and yellow 03/07-09/07, which is a collection of EP and comp tracks.
Sitting over lemonades in Café Oto before the first date of their first European tour earlier this month, Pearson agrees that aggression is played out. "We get called childlike sometimes, but whatever. If that means we're honest, wide-eyed, then that's cool. When you see someone freaking out, it's like 'Yeah, that's interesting...'"
Barber and Pearson met through mutual friends (one of the Death Set, actually) in 2006 or so, and wanted to get together immediately. "We met while we were in the middle of our solo projects, and we just decided to work together," says Barber. Adds Pearson: "It was nice to do something not thinking too much – I find it really refreshing to collaborate and not have to think about, you know, classical form. I never annotate our music, but sometimes I'm still like 'You can't just change time signatures like that!' And Rob's like 'It's fiiine! It sounds good to me.'"
"We make tracks kinda like a collage, actually," says Barber. "We just make these small bits of a sound, sample them and piece them together later into songs." Pearson laughs: "The first song we did was just like messing about on a computer – emailing sounds to each through the walls. The other day I was just making this really horrible noise through a recorder, and we're going to loop that. I was reading Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience, it's all about how there can scientifically be a God – this book about man's place in the universe. I got so obsessed with it last summer! But you have to stop drawing your place in the universe all day. It's good to have mundane tasks to stop your head exploding."
