High Places, Soft Circle, Kyle H. Mabson, Feb. 5, Danger Danger Gallery

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High Places, Soft Circle, Kyle H. Mabson, Feb. 5, Danger Danger Gallery

POSTED: Sunday, February 8, 2009, 7:18 PM

Filed Under: Music Show

High Places

Photo | Hisham Bharoocha

I forgot to bring my camera to Danger Danger, so you're missing out on seeing (mostly) the backs of a bunch of heads. I also forgot my earplugs, so I'm currently missing a decent portion of the audible frequency range. Turns out High Places puts on an pretty ear-splitting show.

Like other bands whose recordings come off as gently hazy swirls of psychedelic noise, the Brooklyn duo's percussive attack is a lot more prominent in person. It's noisy in a good-natured, even celebratory way; it's hard to detect any aggression in Robert Barber and Mary Pearson's mild-mannered stage presence. Nevertheless, their multi-layered thumping and clattering — derived from a tangle of electronic gadgets along with shakers and wooden temple blocks, played into mics with massive amounts of delay — felt unruly and unfocused, and grew wearying after a song or two.

Some kids next to me were waxing awesome about seeing them in a grassy Brooklyn lot on a summer afternoon, and I can see how the gleeful racket might be a lot more enjoyable under those circumstances. To be fair, though, the biggest problems with the set could have been due to audio-related technical issues. There was hardly anybody in charge of running sound at the down-and-dirty DDG, something crucial for music as complex and layered as HP's. Furthermore, as Barber announced before their set, they'd been having some mishaps with equipment lately. Things did appear to be going smoothly once they got started, but the noise level made it almost impossible to hear Pearson's cooed vocals, the semi-melodic glue that binds the band's avant-twee compositions.

More enjoyable, though even harder on the ears, were the two acts that preceded them; Los Angeles DJ/noise-terrorist Kyle H. Mabson and High Places' NY-based touring mate Soft Circle.

Hisham Bharoocha, aka Soft Circle

myspace.com/softcircle

Mabson, an unassuming chap in a grey sweater, manned a table full of pedals and samplers and pummeled the crowd with an unpredictable barrage of jackhammering industrial noise, interspersed with fragments of pop hits. Like a sadistic Girl Talk in a particularly bad mood, he'd tease us with snatches of Kanye West, Soulja Boy and Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" before unleashing his sonic assaults, usually in the most manner jarring possible. It was a pretty heavy-handed exercise in contrast — switching, for instance, from a serene recording of a church choir to a thrashing Rage Against The Machine riff laced with an electronic breakbeat. It would have gotten old pretty quickly if he hadn't come up with some additional ideas, or at least managed a more skillful execution (his occasional moments of shakiness might have been more deliberate aggravation, but more likely they were just clumsy). For the 10 or 15 amped-up minutes that his set lasted, though, it made for some decently enjoyable WTF.

Soft Circle is Hisham Bharoocha of the band Black Dice. Though he's only one man, his performance carried the intensity and fullness of a four-person band thanks to his coordinated use of looping technology. It was hard to always tell just what was going on on stage and how it related to the music, a torrent of hard-edged, hippie-ish grooves that felt like psychedelic punk-funk reinvented as electronica, or possibly vice versa. Bharoocha was continually turning in all directions to handle his elaborate set-up, playing and looping guitar riffs, calling and chanting into his headset mic, and fiddling with gadgets, but he spent the bulk of his set banging on a drum kit right at the front of the stage, ensuring maximal visceral excitement. He worked the crowd like a DJ, seamlessly transitioning from groove to groove without a pause, sometimes dropping out on drums only to build the energy back up with a series of manic fills. Bashing away and watching as the crowd cut loose, he let the music lead us to some truly high places.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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