GFF 2012: High Places interview

Electronic two-piece High Places, aka Rob Barber and Mary Pearson, are in playful mood when they speak to The Skinny from their LA studio ahead of their upcoming UK tour, which takes in a performance at Glasgow Music and Film Festival. In fact, it feels a bit like they are pulling the old 'good electro-pop musician/bad electro-pop musician' routine. When Pearson, who's effervescent and charming, mentions her love of old school hip hop, I inquire facetiously if she’d ever consider swapping her haunting vocals for a spell as High Places’ Master of Ceremonies? Her response is delightfully self-deprecating: “I think I have to come to terms with how my voice sounds and what I’m capable of doing, I made peace with that a while ago. I don’t think there’ll be any rapping in the near future.”

“You have been writing a lot of new songs that are about sneakers,” deadpans Barber, High Places’ more sardonic half.

“And about being the flyest girl in the club,” chuckles Pearson.

You can hear this same salty/sweet quality in the duo’s music: ostensibly it’s experimental electronica that’s soft to the touch. I suspect this musical dichotomy comes from their different backgrounds: Pearson, who was “raised in the pretty-world part of Michigan”, started her music career studying classical bassoon; Philly city boy Barber, meanwhile, describes himself as an autodidact. I put this theory to them. “Mostly I treat the band as a departure from classical training,” explains Pearson, “and it’s really freeing in a lot of ways because there aren’t any boundaries. We can just say exactly what we want and we don’t feel constrained by the rules of western song writing.”

“You do use, like, terminology and stuff that I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” teases her bandmate. “She’ll be saying some technical phrase and I’ll be like: ‘Do you mean a power cord?’”

Their latest album, Original Colors, blends funky, incessant rhythms with Pearson’s ethereal vocals; dreamy lyrics wash over the record, smoothing the hard edges and creating a sound that lives and breathes. “We’ve always been interested in how much humanity you can give to electronic music, because it can be so machinelike and robotic,” says Pearson. “We want to give it some feel of emotion behind it, and allow for some human error.”

Altos Lugares, from Original Colors

This is even more evident in their live performances. Barber explains his predilection for percussion-based samplers because they respond to the velocity at which they are struck, creating a rawer, more idiosyncratic sound. “It allows a little bit more fluidity to the song, so that everything’s not just locked in; it’s a little bit loose on the edge,” It’s also more enjoyable – and damp. “It’s not like I like sweating in front of people or anything, but it’s definitely more fun to actually move around and stuff.”

Working in harmony with this organic versus inorganic sound are the various image collages the pair have created together, which work as a kind of cinematic journal. “Our songs are dancy-ish," says Barber, "but they are also clouded in and dense – it doesn’t really make sense for us to have visuals that are kind of just going off catastrophically while we’re playing. They are kind of reflective of our tour, where we’re basically collecting visual elements on a day-to-day basis.”

“I feel like they kind of compliment the music in that there’s a lot of inspiration from the natural world,” adds Pearson. “It’s hard to top that in terms of creative inspiration.”

The Pull, from Original Colors