Dig This! School of Seven Bells

Variations on this rhythm-harmony axis guide School of Seven Bells, a Brooklyn-based trio made up of the Deheza sisters and Benjamin Curtis, and are at the heart of the group’s yearning electronic psychedelia. This may be a strange kind of music to come from musicians previously associated with being comfortably alt-indie (Curtis is a founding member of Secret Machines, the Dehezas were in On! Air! Library!). But maybe a mix that effortlessly evokes studio-built, inner-space atmospheres and a planet’s worth of textures is exactly what should be expected from constantly-evolving multi-instrumentalists who named their project after an academy that trained pickpockets in South America. Beyond anything else, School of Seven Bells is a deep collaboration – the formation and the direction of which was at the heart of the conversation when they sat down to talk to Rhapsody.

The Backgrounds
Alejandra ‘Aly’ Deheza: [We grew up] partly in [Washington] D.C. and partly in Miami. Our dad was an opera singer before we were born, so he always had a bunch of records in the house, opera records, and we’re Costa Rican and Bolivian so a lot of traditional instruments [from those cultures] are in our house. Basically, they were always laying around. And later on, we were in flute and French horn lessons, choir lessons, [learned how to] read music, theory and all that. But everything else [we learned] by ear. I figure once you get that part, the rest of it is just the mechanics of the instrument, so it’s not that hard.

I’m sure the most annoying phenomenon for everybody around us: we couldn’t sing together without harmonizing. I really don’t know where that came from, but car trips were a nightmare for whoever was in the car, because it was just over and over again we’d always try to perfect them, you know?

Claudia Deheza: Yeah, we didn’t really know what we were doing; we knew that it was kind of boring to just sing along to something, that it was more fun to, I guess, harmonize. We didn’t know we were harmonizing; we just knew it sounded good together.

Aly: [Though our father was a singer,] he never pushed it. He went into radio after he stopped doing opera. He always had recording equipment around, so we’d mess around with it and record ourselves singing. He thought it was kind of funny, but he never thought about it seriously.

Benjamin Curtis: I was born in Oklahoma and the first instruments I played were in my dad’s church. I had piano lessons from the time I was five until I was 16, probably. And then I immediately started playing in rock 'n' roll bands -- that was it. I was always playing drums.

Aly: The first song he actually picked up was “Wild Thing” on this drum set that his grandparents got him.

Benjamin: Yeah, I got my grandparents to buy me a drum set which was cool. People were always saying, “Oh my god, he is so gifted;” no, I was just smacking everything around so they had a false sense of my ability early on. I didn’t play guitar until I started Secret Machines, just because I felt like playing something different. So, by chance, I started playing guitar.

The Bonds
Benjamin: We were booked on the same tour. On! Air! Library! and Secret Machines [opening for] Interpol in November of 2004, and we probably didn’t interact that much at first but I watched a lot of their sets, and I was just really, really impressed. Especially moments when there were these vocal ideas happening; I thought it was a real gem, a really special thing. [At the time,] Ally mentioned she maybe wasn’t doing On! Air! Library! much after that, and was talking about a project that she had been thinking up called School of Seven Bells. I was thinking I wanted to be a part of that, whatever it was going to be.  It didn’t really happen until 2007. [In the meantime,] Ally was writing a lot, I went around the world with Secret Machines again, and Claudia made a record of her solo stuff [as A Cloud Mireya].

Claudia: No one heard it. [Laughs.]

Benjamin: All of those experiences individually led us to a place when we had this really synchronic vision for School of Seven Bells, which is lucky. The energy was so intense that we knew this was what we needed to focus on.

What we bond over, really, is rhythm in the music. A lot of the emotion is on the top of the music spectrum. We’re very deliberate about beats and making sure that they are active. [But] as far as the instruments go, we tend to not make music or really do things that hit so hard.

We were really into a lot of those cumbias from Totó la Momposina, those kinds of vocals and group-singing. We were also into electronic music but really interested in the humanness of that, of all these voices happening. So we interpreted that in our own way – and, of course, no one would necessarily [hear] that parallel. And when we play, [we thought] it would be atmospheric. Just mix all that up -- that’s totally our record.

The Recordings
Benjamin: Lyrically [we write] individually, usually. Then it becomes collaborative between [Aly and Claudia]. Musically, an idea will start with these two and then it’s really a collaboration. We seem to be really good at allowing each other to just disassemble anything at anytime, and rearrange it. It always gets better.  Claudia was saying that yesterday, that Aly will do something and we never would have thought of that.  It has this kind of mystery, because all three of us aren’t really sure how we get there.  

We didn’t make [Alpinisms] with playing live in mind whatsoever.  We were just doing things that came to us, with sounds that work and twisting them into other sounds.  We made it at home in our own studio, so we spent a lot of time deliberating microscopic ideas.  

Claudia: [The album as released is,] I think, just where we were at the time.

Benjamin: Yeah, a snapshot. I think it’s good at any given point in time. [Otherwise] it just changes and evolves. Alpininsms really was the moment it was extracted from our hands because if it was, if we had continued … well, we probably would have deleted it. But I think the three of us feel like Alpinisms is the peak, the overall statement that the songs needed to make.

The Future
Aly: The live set is what determines that a lot of times. [Once] we toured, it changed a lot about the way we want to hear our songs on a record.

Benjamin: And I think Claudia’s gone in this whole other direction that’s really interesting, that wasn’t really,  featured as much on Alpinisms. It's really cool in a melodic sense, it’s got a nice counterpoint so I think that’s an element that’s on the rise for sure.