Northfield by Happy Place

Happy Place is a NYC-based band of two drum sets and two guitarists playing a through-composed suite of avant-garde music inspired equally by noise metal and contemporary classical music. Written by new music composer and percussionist Will Mason during a state of extreme and protracted sleep deprivation brought on by anxiety, the music on their debut album Northfield is an exploration and celebration of the altered states of consciousness that asceticism elicits. It is about experiencing exultation through absence. It is about ecstasy through privation.

In 2014, Mason started being unable to sleep more than four hours a night. “After about four months I started to hallucinate,” he said. “I was literally out of my mind. It was an agonizing and ascetic place to be.” Mason was eventually inspired to use that experience as a window into altered and even elevated states of consciousness. He started to think about how suffering and asceticism were prerequisites for a certain kind of peak musical experience. He spent his sleepless hours writing music in his kitchen: little figures, short snippets, long processes. Their length became meaningless in the agonizing non-moments of restlessness, when time feels unfamiliar, feels changed.

The suite of songs that resulted bring to mind cutting-edge rock artists like Lightning Bolt, Tyondai Braxton, and Zs as well as contemporary concert music giants like Giacinto Scelsi, Gyorgi Ligeti, and Gérard Grisey. The album threads together a series of short, visceral pieces, from the manic, off-center “Fork!” and the hocketing drum and guitar pairs of “Spoon!” to the pounding tom-tom march and spectral guitar chords of “Rupture!” The album culminates in the 13-minute epic “Rapture!”, which spirals a chain of short motives into their outer limits.

Happy Place features Mason on drums, along with drummer Austin Vaughn (Here We Go Magic, Pavo Pavo) and guitarists Andrew Smiley (Little Women, Will Mason Ensemble) and Will Chapin (Empyrean Atlas). The band has gained renown for their powerful live performances. The music is physically intense to play, even painful at times, not to mention mentally taxing. It is performed ritualistically, at high volume and with high intensity, without interruption.

"In exceptional rituals—ecstatic revelations, states of possession during which individuals dance or make music highly charged with the supernatural—one of the methods employed all over the world consists in putting performers outside their daily rhythmic cycles by breaking their physiological routines with fasting and lack of sleep. The end result may be excitement of the psyche, but the starting point is visceral. The change of register cannot be brought about unless it starts in the very depths of the organism."
-- Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech

From drummer and composer Will Mason, a sextet of two singers, two guitarists, and two drum sets. "Experimental yet still catchy" -- New York Times