High Places may be the most refreshing, intriguing music you will hear anytime soon. Mary Pearson’s voice mixed with the instrumentals of Rob Barber is a welcome escape from musical boundaries that creates one of the most captivating, sensual experiences in modern music. (Pearson graduated from this writer’s alma mater, Western Michigan University) The lazy man would describe High Places as experimental pop, but the group’s comforting sound is way too broad to be blankly labeled anything other than worldlysoulpopnewagehootanannyhoedown.

After a series of small releases in the form of singles, 7″, and contributions to compilations the band’s first full length album came out on Tuesday.

Buy the album HERE

• MP3: High Places – From Stardust to Sentience
• High Places – New Grace

The duo stopped by Minneapolis on Wednesday and took some time to talk with Above the Fold. Here’s what they had to say:

ABOVE THE FOLD: Congratulations on the new album …how does it feel to know you have a full-length release for people to own?
Rob: The last thing we put out was all our 7” and stuff. It never felt quite right. It felt like it was a little all over the place.
Mary: The record feels more complete. Now that its out it feels like we are more of a proper band…finally.
Rob: Now that it’s out it makes me want to work on more stuff.

ATF: Feel like a goal was reached?
Rob: More like a dream than a goal. Goals are so specific and I don’t usually have goals. I gave up goals awhile ago. To avoid feeling like I failed I tend to just have dreams cause they’re more vague. Like ‘It’d be so sweet if I was in this peripheral area a year from now.’
Mary: Early on we essentially were sort of surprised with every new thing that came up with the band. Then people started asking us when we were going to have a full length. Now its more of a conscious thing that this is what we’re doing.
Rob: We were kind of late bloomers. We weren’t really sure what we could do. We still are figuring out a lot of stuff like ‘we could do that, I didn’t know we could do that.’
Mary: The first show where they gave us a few $20s and we were like ‘WHOA! We can almost buy a tank of gas. They’ll pay you $80 dollars to play music?”
ATF: You are technically from New York, but you seem to tour a lot. Do you feel like your homebase is New York?
Rob: I want to get back in the swing of playing shows, like small shows in New York. It doesn’t feel like we played a lot of proper small shows like ‘where we came from’
Mary: I think I’ve gotten to where New York feels like home now. I will fly back from somewhere and people will be slamming into you in the airport and it kind of feels nice you’re like “ahh…the New Yorkers.”

ATF: You both bring very unique talents and abilities to your group. Describe what its like when you collaborate your sounds to create songs.
Rob: A lot of it is kind of surprising the other person. One of us will come home and be like ‘Hey, what do you think of this?” And it will sort of be a root of an idea. Then we get really stoked on it then we’d start working on things together, but then we’ll sit on it for like 6 months. Then we find the file again a little later and we’re like ‘I have an idea, it didn’t make sense at the time but now I think it does.”
Mary: A lot of times we get some inspiration. I think when a writer has little index cards with ideas they’ve had and they reference one of those when they’re feeling stuck. I feel like we do that. We’ll open a short recording of one of us like whistling something really weird. A lot of times we’ll be sitting at the computer together and someone’s just like tapping something and we’ll hit record and be like ‘that sounded cool.’ Then we’ll just save it as ‘tappy thing’ then we can never remember what we named anything. We’ve had sooo many ‘Bloopy Bass.’ We started naming everything ‘Voice Collage’
Rob: We should name a song ‘Fart Paws’ (referencing graffiti on the walls of the green room at the Triple Rock)

ATF: Your sound is very hard to put a label on, which as a musician is probably a good thing but for a journalist is not so much. What influences or experiences in your lives led you to create such inventive music?
Rob: Boredom. Or escapism.
Mary: Travelling influences us a lot. In the next few days we are traveling to Colorado and we’re really excited. Every U.S. tour we always have stuff that we collect and pick all over the van.

ATF: Your music is very worldly and I know your split single with Xiu Xiu came with polaroids taken by David Horvitz…how much of an influence are destinations in your music?
Rob: I think we started the band as a means to an end to just travel. This could get us to actually go somewhere and see the world. I think as far as the music itself, I feel like I like creating a spacial place that doesn’t exist.
Mary: I think a lot of our songs are about a journey rather than a destination. There’s definitely that sort of escapism but also look around yourself and appreciating whats there. Even if its not a positive happy thing, but a learning experience. I think that’s a lot of what the new record is about Not that everything is great, but that you can gain something from the mundane and the challenging.
ATF: Mary, you studied bassoon performance in college, if your professors heard High Places, what do you think they would say?

Mary: I bassoon professor has been really supportive. I’m sort of curious about that sometimes, its definitely something different than what I was doing there. That influence in music school I cant really escape. With a lot of our polyrhythms and stuff I totally think of this one professor who taught us all these pneumonic devices like ‘Pass the Gosh Darn Ketchup’ (she said in rhythm with leg claps). So it definitely slips in to my writing.

ATF: For people that haven’t had the luxury of seeing you live, describe what a typical High Places show entails?
Rob: I think the thing is different for people, and I wish you could get across on the record is we like it to be pretty loud. Its definitely not delicate sounding live and I wish the record doesn’t sound delicate. I feel like its pretty beat driven. That’s the thing that tends to surprise people.
Mary: We want to sound a little more dub. We have two keyboard stands with a bunch of electronics on them. We have percussion and drum pads and I do a bunch of stuff with my vocals like reverb, delay, and looping. We try to get that stuff down as much as we can to kind of free ourselves up. Someone just compared us with Stomp, which we joke about a lot.
Rob: Who?
Mary: I can’t remember. I think if we tried to recreate all our sounds live we would like Stomp. We’d be like blowing into bottles and stuff.

ATF: What are three things people don’t know about High Places?
Rob: We’re really violent people. Just kidding. We’re pretty open book about evertying, that’s hard.
Mary: We ate Vietnamese sandwiches three days in a row. I’m a mediocre skateboarder and Rob’s better than mediocre.
Rob: We are products of our environment and our environments pretty middle-class and normal. A lot of people put a lot of weight on the psychcedelic. A lot of it is kind of accidental and we’re kind of these wide-eyed normal kids.
Mary: We’re products of the 21st century where a lot of stuff is normal. We’re not trying to pretend we’re not white kids that grew up in suburbia.
Rob: There’s a lot of people that do character roles when they make music, which is kind of rad. I kind of am into people that do that.
Mary: We’re basically two friends who were like lets try putting together our musical ideas and the two of us will have a lot of fun no matter what anyone else thinks. When we found out there was some audience for it we were really shocked cause it allowed us to keep doing it.
Rob: We’re basically just one big accident. I mean in a good way.
Mary: My mom did say she thought she was going to stop having kids after three…maybe we are an accident (laughter).