School of Seven Bells: Set to Soar Higher with “Disconnect from Desire”

GREENPOINT, BROOKLYN: You always remember your first time. For me, it was in my office. The afternoon sun was shining. I slipped it in.

School of Seven Bells

I pressed “Play” on my CD machine, and the sound of Alpinisms from School of Seven Bells filled up the room. Like a lot of people, I was instantly struck — and a little bit transformed — by what I heard: psychedelic; dreamy; lucid; noise; world music; pop; guitar; elevated intelligence; hair-raising emotion; loopy live beats and heavenly hypnotic voices.

Since their 2008 debut with Alpinisms, Benjamin Curtis and Alejandra + Claudia Deheza have been on the move far more than they ever expected. The Brooklyn trio’s original sound was not just widely heard, it was widely embraced by an enchanted global audience that was more than ready for a band just like this one.

Now that the twin sisters and their guitar-wielding collaborator have one album under their belts, their musical world has become rich – very rich. Confidence and control guided their every move as they recorded the transcendent Disconnect from Desire, dropping today, July 13th on Vagrant/Ghostly International. Curtis gave us a group update and album preview on an early summer day, straight from a comfy bench in McCarren Park.

Things have obviously gone well for School of Seven Bells since the release of Alpinisms in 2008. Were you surprised by the big response that the band and your sound received?

I think if you make anything, you should have a big degree of confidence that people will like it. I definitely expected SVIIB to find its place in the current music scene, but at the same time there’s a lot of discovery happening with a first album as the band finds its feet.

I also think that because we’d been in bands previously, we were familiar with the various phases, and we got there more quickly. We’ve always been looking forward to Album Two.

It seems like SVIIB didn’t have the typical “band plan”, but somehow your success so far has played out in textbook fashion.

That’s totally true. We didn’t expect it to become as traditional a band as we’ve become. We had no preconceptions. We knew we were going to make some music, and that was really it – we didn’t know how it was going to happen, when or how much. It’s definitely all a surprise at this point.

When did you start to make more specific plans to record Disconnect from Desire?

We were touring a lot, playing show after show after show. I think a lot of times, you have this moment where you say, “We’ll I guess we have to make album number two.” But we never really had that, because the music just started coming, and it came really quickly.

In particular, last Spring on a tour of Europe, I just started writing music on my laptop, a little keyboard and some acoustic guitars. A lot of ideas came really quickly, in the span of a couple of weeks, and that’s basically the musical bedrock of Disconnect from Desire. It was really exciting, really coherent. Ally and Claudia were on the same wavelength exactly, and started sharing things, and the basic idea for the album was ready to go. It was just a matter of finding the time to make it.

What is Disconnect’s “basic idea” that you referred to?

There’s a few. One would be a very general one that’s not even about the aesthetic or the instruments or the music, which is just that we’re really sure of what we’re about right now. There’s this sort of confidence that now we can make the SVIIB record that we really want to make. Whereas before there was a lot of “Is this good? Does that work? Does any of this make sense? Will anyone care?” That’s good. That can be creative. But I also think confidence can be more powerful.

You recorded Alpinisms in a home studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Did you return there for Disconnect?

We all move up to Greenpoint January (of 2009), and we didn’t really start tracking anything until July. We never thought, “Hey, let’s go to this studio and book time,” we just started working in the way we’d always worked. It sounded great. It just got to the point where it was important for us to make Disconnect from Desire in the same way we made Alpinisms.

When I interviewed you for Remix in 2008, you were using a pretty basic setup: Neumann U87, Universal Audio SOLO/610 preamp, Focusrite interface, and MacBook Pro running Logic, plus a lot of effects pedals that you put on guitars and drums. How was your recording rig different for Disconnect?

I built a Hackintosh, a much more powerful computer, which is awesome. We were able to lay a lot things down more at once, without fear of the laptop bursting into flames. Otherwise, it’s all similar. There’s a lot more guitars on this album, and I think probably that was the biggest difference. We’re singing into the same vocal mic, the U87. And we bought a few things for the guitars, like a Sennheiser mic, and used the Neumann sometimes, plus the Shure SM57 a bit – everything through the same preamps basically.

All the synths were from the Access Virus again. We had a lot of fun using the external input on the Virus, triggering guitars through that, which is a new thing I figured out how to do. Other than that, it was pretty simple.

Another thing we discussed in 2008 was your heavy use of effects, convolution reverbs, and anything else screwy on everything besides kick drum or bass. Was that the approach on the new record as well?

I think the attitude on effects is definitely scaled back — there’s a bit of a less-is-more attitude on this record for sure. I know it’s an old story, but it’s all about knowing how to use what you have, and playing to your strengths. We spent a lot more time this time making sure the sound was really good, whereas before I’m not sure I could tell you if everything sounded great or not.

Now I know how to position a mic in front of Ally and Claudia, and I know how to mic my guitar amps to get the sound I need. I know how to record the synths and the drums. That was just one of the reasons the record took so long, is that we took a lot of time to make sure it sounded right before putting everything down.

It can be tough to stop using a lot of effects, but it can also be liberating…

Before there would be a lot of throwing ten things against a wall and making sure that all of them stick. This time, it was more about finding that one great thing, maybe two, and making that work in the arrangement. Which, incidentally made the record a lot bigger-sounding.

I think Brian Eno said that every object you add decreases the significance of every other object in the field. I’m probably butchering that quote, but it made a lot of sense to me, and it’s probably true.

The most magical aspect of SVIIB is how the singers approach their craft. How are Ally and Claudia evolving in the way they collaborate?

Ally’s becoming a lot more confident as a singular voice, which had a big effect on Disconnect from Desire. There’s a lot of moments with an actual lead vocal, which didn’t happen as much on Alpinisms.

That confidence was really great to discover. Having that individual voice out front, leading things is great. I think that as a team, the sisters are more deliberate with the whole color of their harmonies, their sounds, and the texture of their voices.

The new track “Babelonia” (which is available for listening now on the MySpace site) is positively addictive. How did that particular song come together?

There’s a lot of dynamics in that vocal arrangement, and I think if you muted the track the a capella would absolutely stand on its own. We did a lot of fun things on that track. The verse is an example of Ally writing in these leaping arpeggios, and there’s definitely a lead vocal in that song.

We also did a cool thing where, in the chorus, Ally sang the vocal a whole step up, and then we pitched it down back to normal to give it a different artificial sound, which I think was really a cool half accident/half idea.

I had been coincidentally listening to Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet just before I heard the new singles “Windstorm and “Babelonia”, the latter of which sounds like an alternate dimension Stereolab track to me.

The similarities are that there’s so much freedom if you’re writing to what’s essentially a drone. It’s so interesting to see how far you can push the melody over that. The album is so fractured. The idea is one of taking the personality from the lyrics and playing them to the melody, which I think is so interesting.

You asked the hit-making mixer Jack Joseph Puig to mix the record, which came as a surprise to me and a lot of other people.

We just put a lot of energy into the arrangement and tracking, I think that we didn’t have enough objectivity to approach mixing it all. And from the start our idea was to have someone from another world, musically, mix it. The way we recorded it, it wasn’t going to be reinvented in the mix. A lot of minimalism was created in the mix.

Jack approached us, and we said, “Hell yeah! One of the greatest mixers out there mixing our music, how can you say no?” He did a great job. He took some approaches that were unexpected, but for the most part, he just really listened to the music and never reinvented the song.

And especially with the comments that we would come back with, I never saw someone as open as he was. We would say, “This should be really loud,” and he would say, “That’s not how I do it, but if that’s what you want, this will be really loud, and it will be amazing.” That job – mixing – is totally a combination of service and creativity.

Soooo…the Second Album’s about to come out. What are you expecting now?

It’s looking like we’re gonna tour that much, and it just feels great. It’s a completely different experience coming back with this record, just playing for fans on these shows who have spent time with our music. We’re feeling a lot of love, which is really exciting.

It just all comes down to demand. If they want us to play somewhere, we’ll play there! We’re not trying to force anyone to have us play everywhere on Earth. We get asked, so we do it. We’re LUCKY.

With the release of Alpinisms, you were clearly not sure that people would “get it”. But lo and behold, it seems like they do. So what’s the “it” that people actually get about School of Seven Bells?

That’s a really good question. Maybe a few things – it’s speculation because the three of us are always the last to know what we do. But maybe it’s a realization of what people love about pop music. Maybe it’s a way to listen to music that’s new in a slightly different way. That’s all a musical personality is, just opening another door – one that maybe people hadn’t thought of.

I feel like that happens with a lot of people that we talk to: they say, “I was hoping there was a record like this,” which is the best reaction you can get. That’s what makes me love music, when you say, “That hits the spot. That’s perfect.” You can’t plan that. Either you do it or you don’t.

— David Weiss

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