School Of Seven Bells for this Friday Lunch hour – recorded at the Kreuzberg Festival in Berlin on May 12, 2012 by RBB-Berlin.
Sadly, a band that broke ground and was becoming an established voice in Dreamscape/Indie cut short by the death of its co-founder.
School of Seven Bells (often stylized as SVIIB) were from New York City, and formed in 2007. It originally consisted of Alejandra Deheza (vocals, guitar), her sister Claudia Deheza (keyboards, vocals) and Benjamin Curtis (guitar, synthesizers, vocals). Claudia left the group in 2010, and Curtis died of lymphoma in 2013. Using demos of songs Curtis had written prior to and during his illness, the band’s fourth and final album, SVIIB, was completed posthumously and released in February 2016.
The band took its name from an alleged South American pickpocket training academy. Alejandra told the Sydney Morning Herald that “I was up really late watching TV one night…There was this show on about shoplifting rings in the ’90s that were extremely organized. The police said that they thought these people were trained in this South American school for pickpockets called the School Of Seven Bells.”
Benjamin Curtis (formerly of Secret Machines) met identical twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (both formerly of On!Air!Library!) while opening on an Interpol tour. The three decided to end their commitments to their old bands, move into a shared space and create a home recording studio together.
The band had an unorthodox songwriting process that began with recording vocals, which were then supplemented by the music. Curtis said that this process was the most important part of the band, with “everything else [being] accompaniment”. A before-and-after example was hosted by NPR’s program Day to Day.
In February 2013, Curtis was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma after several weeks of displaying symptoms. Curtis did not recover and died on December 29, 2013, at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
The last piece of music produced by Curtis before his death, a cover of Joey Ramone‘s “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up)”, was made available in June 2014. The group’s fourth album, SVIIB, completed after Curtis’s death, was released in February 2016, preceded by a single, “Open Your Eyes”.
School of Seven Bells’ music was usually described as indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze and electronic. Their sound was described as dreamy and ethereal, and the lyrics as abstract.
According to Benjamin Curtis, SVIIB was inspired by “everything from Kraftwerk, Wire, Beyoncé, New Order, Blonde Redhead, to Section 25 comes to mind, along with singers like Joni Mitchell and Robert Wyatt. We’re huge fans of pop, too, mainly because we’re huge fans of smart songwriting”.
Dive in and enjoy – here comes the weekend.
