The world works on the energy of opposing forces, and High Places is no different. Its two members couldn’t be further apart: Mary, 24, majored in orchestral bassoon performance and grew up in small-town Michigan, while Rob, 34, was studying visual art and engaging in the punk and hardcore music scenes. The group’s songs are just as surprising.

They manage to take elements of electronic and noise music and merge it with tropical rhythms and sweet-sounding semi-spoken vocals to make some counterintuitive — and surprisingly danceable — pop songs. When asked about his vision for the group, Rob told the music download website eMusic, “I thought it would be cool to channel something like Beat Happening and filter it through Black Dice.”

Their technique is admittedly haphazard and results in songs that are sometimes surprising, even to the duo. The songs start off without much direction in mind, but according to Rob, “Lyrically is when it starts to take hold for me as far as what the song really feels like … before that it just seems fragmented.” The real magic, it seems, comes from the collaboration: They’ve even gone so far as to describe themselves as a trio, saying, “It’s almost like a third person making the music.” Certainly, High Places is more than the sum of its parts, both members with their own diverse and differing background adding something to the entire process.

Mary and Rob met in Brooklyn in 2006 and High Places started as an experiment that was only supposed to last a summer. It soon became clear that High Places was something more and Mary abandoned her plans to continue to graduate school: “A lot of times, you learn what you don’t want to do from school…. I want to break all of these rules I just learned.” They released a number of limited-edition seven inches and compilation tracks that were compiled into an album by eMusic, then released on CD by their new label, Thrill Jockey. Their self-titled debut full-length album is out Sept. 23, and marks significant growth for the duo. Partly to account for this growth, according to Rob, is their exhaustive touring, especially with “Lucky Dragons, who construct music in a lot of similar ways, using acoustic sounds and piecing them together into a bigger picture.” Mary added, “You learn so much from seeing a band play every night that you can’t help being influenced by something.”

Xiu Xiu, Jamie Stewart’s passive-aggressive pop outfit, has long thrived on raw transitions from whispers to shrieks, from clean guitar tones to squeals of errant synth, from melody to melodrama. His work is a theater of contrasts that has spellbound hipsters, noizeniks, and emo kids for nearly a decade. The group played for a sweaty throng at Garfield Artworks a couple weeks ago as part of their annual autumn tour. Cloistered in the back of the jam-packed gallery, they carved out a concise medley of recent tracks with their collection of gongs, drums, keyboards, and whistles.

Xiu Xiu’s performances show that violence is the obverse side of intimacy, or even its precondition. In Stewart’s world, where overt emotions emanate from closeted tragedies, ironies are mourned, not smirked at. Were it not for his mad lyrical finesse, this whole messy Xiu Xiu affair would simply be over the top. But Stewart’s rage, remorse, and libido show themselves in palpable images that create narratives all by themselves: a glass heart clinking, a little girl with her head shot open, a deformed penis.

These images embody the tenderness and fury of Xiu Xiu with more efficacy than even Stewart’s on-stage histrionics. In fact, his stories enable his spectacle. In art, certainly, “nothing exists in itself”; it’s up to the writer to make real the contrasts that ultimately burn us to the ground or freeze us to death. Stewart does this with words, and takes it a step further, showing with his delivery that even our contrasts (male versus female, love versus hate, noise versus music) are fabrications, and wicked ones at that.

Noise groups like Yellow Swans and Prurient were well chosen as the preface to Xiu Xiu’s act. When plugged into a thicket of tabletop electronics, a guitar no longer acts like a guitar. In the hands of such groups, a plucked string will unleash a magma-bath of distortion for a half-minute after it’s been touched. It enacts sonic violence that is as captivating as it is impossible to trace. When Xiu Xiu take the stage, they give that dynamic a bitter heart, a nostalgic mind, and abused genitals. In their songs, the buried abjection of the past blossoms wretchedly in the present. Deceptive violence lurks in the band’s own name. One expects aural clutter from the articulation of the two capital “X”s in “Xiu Xiu,” but the name, when spoken, dissipates in the gentlest doubled hush: “shoo, shoo.”

Often, shows are emotional experiences. People say that the shows have “changed their lives forever” or talk about the euphoria they felt at the climax of a set, feeling “washed” or “cleaned” by the band channeling energy into sound and somehow through that affecting the audience’s hearts and minds. But how often are shows emotional experiences for the band?

A friend of mine told me about the Silver Jews show last week. I wasn’t there, but according to her it was essentially witnessing a messy breakup on stage. As the band fractured and the members scowled, the songs got commensurately more intense, and the audience was held in thrall by the drama of the situation. This sort of experience, she said, made the show really memorable and probably improved its emotional effectiveness, but it also made the show uncomfortable and awkward for those attending.

This reminded me of when I saw the Brothers Unconnected over the summer. Alan and Richard Bishop, two-thirds of the Sun City Girls, did a “memorial tour” for the other third, their recently deceased drummer, Charles Gocher. If something’s a “memorial tour” then obviously it was going to be emotional, but I wasn’t really prepared for what happened.

The night started off with a showing of Gocher’s experimental films, a significant side hobby of his. These were bizarre, lots of them featuring multiple Gochers superimposed on one another via pointing cameras at TVs.

Many of Gocher’s avant-garde poems were set to music played by the Brothers Unconnected, and these were often extremely vulgar, sufficiently so that I cannot reproduce them here. The Bishops yelled them, angry and sneering, between more subdued SCG songs, and often I was genuinely uncomfortable with the images they painted and the intensity with which they sang, but I was also extremely intrigued. The crowd seemed alternately amused and frightened, but its attention absolutely never wavered. All eyes were always fixed on the stage.

After the show, I had no idea whether or not I liked it but I knew that I would absolutely not forget it and I was glad I went. I’m still not totally sure, months later, whether I had fun at all. Every time I talk about it with a friend, though, I lean toward yes. It was so raw and uncomfortable that it was tough to take, but isn’t that what art is about?