High Places began as an experiment in collaboration: two people with diverse artistic backgrounds coming together to merge their skills, aesthetic tastes, and music-making approaches. Robert Barber grew up listening to punk and hardcore, and Mary Pearson studied bassoon performance, but both gravitated toward a DIY compositional style and a love of layers. It is the affinity for layering that has thus far defined the duo, both in ideas and instrumentation. High Places<#8217; songs contain a fascinating range of aural layers: bells and bird calls over a wash of ocean waves; mallets hitting mixing bowls over treated guitar and glockenspiel; Mary<#8217;s reflective vocals over Rob<#8217;s homemade beats. The result is an imaginative and spacious amalgamation of sounds with a unique, almost Caribbean undertone that is as immediate as it is refreshing.
Since their inception in 2006, High Places have honed their <#8220;exquisite corpse<#8221; style of songwriting, exchanging ideas back and forth, challenging one another<#8217;s expectations, pushing both performance and songs to new places, or more aptly, new heights. With each single, from <#8220;Head Spins<#8221; to <#8220;Sandy Feat<#8221; from <#8220;Greeting the Light<#8221; to <#8220;Granola<#8221; the band has revealed more complex elements within their layers be it in vocal texture, delicate melodic sense, or in new dimensions to their ever inventive and propulsive percussion.
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High Places began as an experiment in collaboration: two people with diverse artistic backgrounds coming together to merge their skills, aesthetic tastes, and music-making approaches. Robert Barber grew up listening to punk and hardcore, and Mary Pearson studied bassoon performance, but both gravitated toward a DIY compositional style and a love of layers. It is the affinity for layering that has thus far defined the duo, both in ideas and instrumentation. High Places<#8217; songs contain a fascinating range of aural layers: bells and bird calls over a wash of ocean waves; mallets hitting mixing bowls over treated guitar and glockenspiel; Mary<#8217;s reflective vocals over Rob<#8217;s homemade beats. The result is an imaginative and spacious amalgamation of sounds with a unique, almost Caribbean undertone that is as immediate as it is refreshing.
