The FADER Magazine Issue 52 March 2008

Happy Together
High Places

“We just look way cooler with the wind blowing through our hair.”

High Places began as a long distance relationship. After Brooklyn’s Robert Barber and Kalamazoo’s Mary Pearson befriended each other as touring solo artists, they began mailing each other incomplete musical ideas for the other to finish, the collaborative result always more gratifying than the original. “If Mary’s involved with it, I can enjoy it a lot more because there is this other person that makes me step outside of my brain,” says Barber. “I have all of these recordings, but without her in the mix, they feel like something’s missing.”

Listening to High Places is like an epic white-water rafting trip with Gang Gang Dance or cliff-jumping with Jesus. The duo has blended a sonic smoothie of Pearson’s lithe vocals, Barber’s thick collage of rhythms and the Earth’s natural sounds—oddball ingredients that dart and nose-dive in directions nearly impossible for the ear to follow. Each song is fuel for barefooted spazzery or guiltless navel-gazing, the cosmic byproduct of two weirdos finding each other.

Although their intensely DIY stance has found them at plenty of basement and loft shows, Barber and Pearson believe the band is best suited for playing outdoors. “We just look way cooler with the wind blowing through our hair,” says Pearson. “Yeah, in shorts,” adds Barber. High Place’s outlandish soundsystem of gnarly knobs and weird frequencies has become somewhat of a nightmare for sound guys and girls, with only the less controlling ones willing to let the duo make their ruckus the way they want to make it. “In a lot of ways, you can hide behind that,” says Barber. “It’s almost like when you have a guitar and you’re playing clean, you have to be more precise. But if you have a ton of distortion, you can windmill it and play behind your head.”

Since Pearson moved to Brooklyn nearly two years ago to further the duo’s creative (and platonic!) partnership, High Places have been playing and writing without much rest. Between recording a series of split 7-inches with and for their friends, compiling tracks for a full length and touring the far reaches of the country, they are almost always with each other. “But at the same time we’ll miss each other super bad when we’re not together,” admits Barber. “It’s weird, we’re creepy.”