Monday, June 22, 2009

High Places

"Wow... As I listen to this, the memories all come flooding back into me. Mary and I met through Beau Velasco of the Death Set. She had just played a show with Japanther, whom Beau was a roadie for, and then came to NY to do a bassoon lesson and we all hung out. We became really fast friends, and around New Years 2006, only a couple weeks after meeting, Mary set up a show for me and Matt & Kim in Kalamazoo. We became really stoked on each other's solo projects, which were at that point, both in their infancy. We felt that even though they were seemingly really different, mine being loud maximal dense and obsessively layered, and Mary's being improvisation based, mostly acoustic, minimal and unamplified, that we for sure could make this work. A few months later after basically talking every night to the point falling asleep on the phone, Mary moved to NYC, and we became roommates. The objective was to go on tour together as our two solo bands. We did still plan on starting a band together at some point, but before we got very far along in the process of getting our dual solo tour together, Mary found one of my solo songs on my computer and realized that it fit exactly to one of her songs. Maybe she adjusted some of her vocal phrasing a bit, but it was like a finished song immediately. That song was Sandy Feat. We got really stoked, jumped in headfirst and wrote and recorded 5 more songs in the next couple weeks. I think that the speed in which we worked is pretty apparent in the recordings, but we were still learning a lot. In those weeks, we played our first show in North Adams, MA with Japanther, and it was pretty awkward... we had like a 6 minute set, and a cover of Autobahn by Kraftwerk. As you know, that song is like 27 minutes long. We did about 2 and Mary looked at me and gave me the throat slitting signal and we just stopped, because it basically was a terrible idea. I believe we also each played one of our solo songs with collaboration from the other. Mary played a song called 'The Cat With The Bird On Its Head', about her sister ruling (that song was SOOO good) and I played some weird song about how my boss was a creep, and a miserable human, but I was going to overcome by focusing on being positive. We wanted to do a band we thought was noise music, rooted in punk, but that somehow had a smile on it's face. We wanted to be super loud and weird, but we also wanted to be at emotional odds with all the other loud noisy bands in Brooklyn. I guess being punk, or going against the grain to us meant to try to approach experimental or noise music in a densely shrouded warmer pop based approach, but still being weird and loud. But we still like to break the rules."

--Rob Barber

Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, High Places.



High Places Demo (Pukekos)
1. Hello
2. Sandy Feat
3. Shhh... Hide From The Shadow
4. Dream Team
5. Freaked Flight
6. Dudes Incorporated

1 comment:

ALTCERF said...

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