"The last gasps of summer escape and the bloom fades from her once rosy lips, when better to discover this ray of sunshine to remind us of green leaves and blooming flowers as the nights begin to draw in? Electronic chirps, tweets and twitters flit gently, while Mary Pearson's dazed-sounding vocals murmur about lost ducks and other wonders." Famous words of our notorious light sleeper Nick Ilott on High Places "03/07-09/07" (Thrill Jockey) Album release (see reviews) from summer 2008. As winter time arrives, Nick walks out to catch the High Places at their show in Berlin.
High Places © Nick Ilott/HEHE/Nick Ilott: I hear sounds from around the world in your music, some Caribbean music, some Indian-style drone things going on. Is that something you include intentionally?
Mary Pearson: Well one interview said that we met in the Caribbean and that we’re trying to recreate our vacation. But I’ve never been to the Caribbean.
Rob Barber: I’ve been to Florida, that’s about as close as I’ve been to the Caribbean. The music we do listen to a lot is music from different parts of Asia. Caribbean music – I don't listen to it outright.
MP: We listen to a lot of music from Jamaica.
RB: Yeah, that’s true. When I think of the Caribbean I think of holidays from the Bahamas and the touristy steel drum bands, which are kind of cool in a way.
MP: We don’t use steel drums, but we treat guitars in this way that I think they end up sounding like steel drums. There are very specific rules for Western rock music and we are just kind of like why? Why do you have to have guitar bass drums? Why do you have to play almost every song with a 4/4 time signature? I really just try to forget a load of stuff from music school because I think it can be limiting. We don’t even really think about what key we’re performing in because I don’t even want to worry about it. It’s just freeing to be more creative.
HE: You mentioned Jamaican music, what kinds of Jamaican music to you listen to?
RB: Dub reggae, I like a lot of electronic dancehall, 80s dancehall.
MP: Stuff that two years’ ago I hated. When I moved to New York I was just like ‘no reggae’. I was just sick of it from where I lived and now that's all I listen to.
RB: I don’t like straight-ahead reggae. I like either really, really messed up sounding 70s dub reggae, like King Tubby stuff like that.
MP: Just the really mellow stuff with just a ton of delay.
RB: Or I like really synthetic, pounding, electronic 80s sort of dancehall music.
MP: I guess the influence we take from that is more the prominence of the bassline and also how hip-hop uses bass too. We hear a lot of that in our neighbourhood. You just hear cars going down the street and all you hear is the bass. We don’t totally try to sound like that, but sometimes we’ll have a bass idea and chop it up. And a lot of times the bass is really like that in dance music it’s really kind of…
RB: Broken.
MP: Yeah. Broken and it kind of propels you forward.
RB: I also grew up going to hardcore punk shows and – I don’t like to call it hip-hop – but rap shows. ‘Cause I’m 34 and so I was going to a lot of rap shows in the late 80s. Like Boogie Down Productions, stuff like that, really sparse ‘boom bap’ kind of beats.
HE: Is recording important to the songwriting process?
RB: Definitely it is paramount. As soon as we get done touring at the beginning of 2009, we’re going to start working on our next record and really figure out new ways to approach the live show.
MP: To keep it interesting and for each record to have a unique live show.
RB: Right now we feel a bit locked into our equipment live. I feel like I need to get more comfortable with letting a song build and expand and have a little bit of play in terms of its length.
MP: I suppose right now the songs are very dense, there are so many layers. A poem will usually be shorter than a novel, because in a novel all the little things add up to the big idea; whereas in a poem there’s a lot of symbolism and you can read a really short poem a million times because there’s so much in there. I think that’s why we tend to keep our songs shorter because it would just be so much going on for a six-minute song. But I think that will change for the next record. I think it will be a bit more sparse and a bit longer.
HE: When you reproduce the songs live, how much scope for changing things around do you leave yourselves?
MP: It depends on the song, but we both have live percussion and we have contact mikes. I use my vocal mike on my percussion too and we have effects processors, delay pedal. So that allows room for play and Rob has drum pads, samplers…
RB: I can rearrange some of the samples on the fly.
MP: We have a lot of reverb and delay. We played one song the other night where we just completely improvised, except for the vocal line.
RB: Yeah, we made it up on the spot. We’d never played it before.
MP: A song we hadn’t performed in a year, we just performed the song really differently than we recorded it.
RB: That was the first time I think we ever really did that.
MP: It was fun.
RB: It was fun. I think we just miscommunicated at the beginning. Mary didn’t realise I’d started doing it yet. (to Mary) You were drinking water…
MP: I knew what you were doing.
RB: Really?
MP: Yes.
RB: ‘Cause it wasn’t to be that – I don’t know – anyway, whatever. So we got in a fistfight on stage about it and everyone just walked out of the club, it was awful.
MP: We are very violent when we perform; I’ll get bloody tonight.
RB: I’m not the first Rob in the band; she killed the last Rob.
HE: You were talking about performing the songs differently from the album version.
RB: Some of them, some of them we play a little bit more true.
MP: People always tell us some of the songs sound really different because they didn’t picture us being so loud and having so much bass. I think the record comes across as pretty ambient of something and live it’s pretty rockin’. (laughs)
RB: It’s all different in Europe, because when we tour a home we have our own sound system, basically the size of four large refrigerators, four gigantic speakers. Here it’s what do they already have at the stage? And let that have a hand in what we sound like tonight. Sometimes we’re louder than others.
MP: We’ve talked about it being comparable to a visual installation in a gallery, it’s more of I guess a sound installation. It changes in the space that it occupies. An installation does have a lot do with where it is. I guess that always comes into play.
HE: How would you feel about people playing your music as background music?
RB: I do that a lot. Music to me is spatial and it creates an environment for me. Sometimes I want to listen on headphones and I want to really focus and other times it’s just like Burial. That music is just – I don’t mean this in a bad way – but it’s perfect music to work to. If I’m going to draw or do some kind of visual art thing, or clean my house you know, I love putting stuff like that on. I don’t think it says anything bad against the music. I think it’s a good thing I think it is just creating an environment, an aural environment. When I have things in the background, I definitely still engaged in it.
MP: I think a lot of people do that and I think if they want to do that with our music, that’s OK. It must mean that it’s not so lo fi that it’s jarring or something.
RB: It’s hard for me to say because I’m one of the people who made the music but I could see it working both ways. I could see some one being really into it listening on headphones and I can see someone just putting it on while they eat dinner or something.
high places/thrill jockey
Album: High Places/High Places - Thrill Jockey 2008.
