The Hand You're Dealt
It's All In The Cards For School of Seven Bells

There's a certain amount of raw creativity that must be harnessed in order to fashion truly progressive music, so when electro-pop act School of Seven Bells found themselves at a crossroads, faced with the challenge of choosing a direction for their next album, they asked themselves the question any reasonable innovators would:

What would Brian Eno do?

The trio turned to the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards created in the mid '70s by the ambient music pioneer and Roxy Music alum along with renowned British painter Peter Schmidt, intended to guide creators through times of pressure by referencing a basic set of principals aimed at productive thought. From there bandmates Benjamin Curtis (production/guitars) and identical twins Alejandra Deheza (vocals/guitar) and Claudia Deheza (vocals/keyboards) shuffled the deck and drew an open-ended statement – "Disconnect From Desire" – that eventually became both the title of and driving force behind SVIIB's sophomore release.

"Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt made a deck of cards...designed to get you out of a creative rut," explains Curtis as the group prepares for their appearance at the Manta festival in Portugal; just one of many stops on a summer-long festival circuit. "[We] took the inspiration from the card we pulled and used it in a very broad sense."

The result is an album that resonates with more urgency and intensity than the collaborators' debut work, Alpinisms. "Alpinisms was very much about my mental process," says vocalist Alejandra.  "I was very much in my head...always analyzing. It was me dealing with situations after the fact."

Having grown as a performer over the past two years, the songwriter describes Disconnect from Desire's content as "very immediate."

"[The lyrics] are very much 'in the situation,'" affirms the 31-year-old frontwoman. "I was grabbing, manhandling, and in some cases mangling these thoughts in real time, which is one of the things that made these subjects especially difficult to write about. Time offers you the chance for revision; the chance to make things more acceptable," she points out, acknowledging that "sometimes time isn't a good thing."

The trio, whose synchronicity Curtis quickly tags as "pretty intense," first met in 2005 while performing in separate, now-defunct bands during a stint out on the road with Interpol. At the time, Curtis, once the performing drummer in Texas-based alternative act Tripping Daisy in the mid '90s had moved on to play the guitar for rock-outfit Secret Machines and the Deheza twins were performing in experimental post-rock trio On!Air!Library!. SVIIB took shape in 2007, and the seasoned performers, newly signed to Vagrant Records, released Alpinisms the following year.

"The idea [to start SVIIB] came a few years before it actually happened," details Curtis. "We had absolutely no preconceptions about what we were going to be...other than we knew we wanted to make some music. I think we spent a lot of time throughout the making of our first record figuring out exactly what we loved to do together.

"Ally found the name [School of Seven Bells]," he continues. "It came from a pickpocket school that may have existed in the '80s...and it seemed to fit."