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 Former Secret Machines member BEN CURTIS is now one-third of glorious Brooklyn dream-pop guitar/electronica trio SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS, whose debut Alpinisms is a definite contender for Album Of The Year lists. Here he talks to TOPHER HEALY about sisters, brothers, and songs about imaginary pickpockets.
Thanks to blogs like Brooklyn Vegan and bands like MGMT, you might think the Williamsburg area of New York is some kind of musical volcano, pumping out trendy acts and filling the busy streets with kids in afro-inspired neon glad rags. Not so, says Ben Curtis, one third of electro-dream-pop outfit School Of Seven Bells (SVIIB) … “As soon as a Brooklyn band starts going, I mean they’re on tour and they’re out of town. It’s so weird, there’s hardly any real scene that exists because as soon as people start working, they’re gone. I see people I know from Brooklyn out of state more often than I do in town.”
Curtis knows what he’s talking about. Since amicably quitting his older brother Brandon’s band – underrated psych-rock powerhouse The Secret Machines – in March 2007, Curtis has been on and off the road with SVIIB bandmates Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (formerly of On! Air! Library!), playing shows and developing their crystalline melodies into the lovely forms found on the debut full-length Alpinisms. Most recently they’ve been touring as openers for M83 – incidentally, one-time support act for Secret Machines – SVIIB’s pristine and vocally-centred compositions offer the perfect complement to M83’s hazier, shoegaze-driven electronic pop.
“It’s really good, it’s really appropriate,” says Curtis of the team-up with Frenchman Anthony Gonzalez’s band. “As far as bands that are touring right now, it’s a great statement of music and what’s happening at the moment.”
It’s easy to agree with Curtis’s sentiment. The last couple of years has seen a huge surge in bands taking elements of early ‘90s shoegaze and dreampop and melding them with modern electronic sounds and rhythms. Ulrich Schnauss and M83 spearheaded the charge, Cut Copy even get in on the act with In Colours. It’s nothing terribly new, and with progenitors My Bloody Valentine back on the touring circuit showing everyone how it’s really done, the difference is in what each act can bring to the table. In the case of SVIIB, the secret weapon is the combined singing talent of sisters Alejandra and Claudia. As Curtis explains, unlike a lot of music tarred with the shoegaze brush, SVIIB build their songs from the vocals up.
“99 per cent of the time it’s vocal ideas that start the songs,” he says. “We allow the vocals to define the mood of the song – we wanted them to be very free and to be able to take any turn at any point in time. By ornamenting the song with music and just letting the vocals define where the beat would end up and what kind of atmosphere they live in, that was really unique and it’s a big part of why our record ended up sounding the way it did.”
Alpinisms exists as one of those rare records where the balance of electronic elements and guitar noise gels near-perfectly. Alejandra has a son with Scott Herren, aka Warp Records artist Prefuse 73, and is no stranger to composing on laptops and synths alongside traditional rock instruments. A live drummer (Blonde Redhead’s Simone Pace) turns up on only one track, the epic Sempiternal – but the rhythm programming is so well aligned with the music, it’s not quite the alarming drum machine abuse you might hear on a Jesus And Mary Chain album.
As Curtis admits of the currently very common guitar/electronica crossover, “It can go very, very badly. I think no one knows probably more than I do that we didn’t want to be that band.
“We’d made a record and it was very much an electronic record,” he continues. “And as things went on – Ally [Alejandra] plays guitar as well – we just started to miss the chaos that guitars have … The songs weren’t really written on guitar at all. It’s weird, it put the songs and the music in a particular place that we didn’t fully anticipate.”
Lyrically, Alpinisms is a different kettle of fish yet again. The band’s name came from a documentary about a supposedly mythical South American pickpocket academy, which also inspired Alejandra to write the songs as though they were mysterious messages passed between members of the academy. I ask Curtis what it was like to work within a specific conceptual universe for the songwriting, and whether the trio would be inclined to do it again.
“Yeah, for sure,” he replies enthusiastically. “For some reason it helps us to start with an image in our mind and work from there, because the thing that’s really great about the chemistry within the group is we can work really quickly together. We can just fly off in so many directions and things come really fast, it’s fun. We can make so many different kinds of records.
“But at the same time, it’s fun to take a direction and then head that way. It gives a cohesiveness and purpose to the song. I think it’s a danger, it’s easy to sit in circles and just put down whatever comes to mind. But we realise that we can sit down and do that and it could be ok, but it’s really only great if you stay focused in one direction.”
If that sounds limiting, the band’s more unbridled creative urges are released under a different name, Night Of The Gifts.
“School Of Seven Bells music so much exists in this world, we imagined it needed a sort of opposite,” Curtis explains. We imagine it as School Of Seven Bells in an actual dream state … metreless, rhythmless music that can float off in a million different directions at once. Night Of The Gifts is actually an interesting way to test our ideas and work out vocal arrangements, something that can just stretch off infinitely in either direction.”
With a Night Of The Gifts release planned for 2009, plus further School Of Seven Bells recordings once the trio get a break from touring, it appears to be a very fruitful time for Curtis. He has no regrets about what he says was an amicable split from The Secret Machines, although given the almost simultaneous release of his brother’s band’s self-titled third album, I feel compelled to ask him what he thinks of it – only to be met with the surprising revelation that he hasn’t heard it yet.
“It’s funny. I mean, I heard it in its infant state,” he reveals. “He’s been into doing this more heavy, Bauhaus kind of direction, and I’m happy that he was able to go in that direction and just do it, because I know that’s what he really wanted to do, and I don’t think I would’ve been down with that idea personally. It’s cool, you know. I haven’t listened to it because I haven’t had the time, but I want to give it a good shake. It’s very much my brother’s record and I can’t wait to hear it. I’m proud of him that he was able to do that finally.”
Having heard the record, I suggest that it and Alpinisms actually make interesting companion pieces; School Of Seven Bells the light to The Secret Machines’ darker tones. Curtis responds in agreeably brotherly fashion.
“I’ve been meeting people that are coming to Bells shows that never even saw me in Secret Machines and just checked out my brother’s band a couple of weeks before. They completely dig both of them. So I think you’re right, I think they do complement each other.”
ALPINISMS is out now through Speak n Spell. www.myspace.com/schoolofsevenbells / www.myspace.com/nightofthegifts
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