Bowery Presents

showview

M83

M83

School of Seven Bells

Webster Hall

Fri 11/14
Tickets
18+

Doors 7pm

$20

M83

  • http://www.myspace.com/m83
  • http://www.ilovem83.com/
  • For most of us, our teenage years were an awkward time full of embarrassing moments we’d rather forget. For M83’s chief stargazer Anthony Gonzalez, however, his adolescence turned out to be the most important period of his life, one he looks back upon with great affection. Now, he’s made it the defining theme of his enchanting new album, Saturdays=Youth. “I loved being a teenager,” says Gonzalez, who, at 26, only stopped being one seven years ago. “That’s when I discovered music and started to take drugs and party with my friends. I really started to discover new things. Nowadays I would like to be a teenager again.”

    The idea of youth – wasted, gilded or otherwise – has featured prominently in M83’s music. From early fumblings like “At The Party” on 2001’s self-titled debut to the bliss-fuzz of “Teen Angst” from 2005’s breakthrough album Before The Dawn Heals Us, the French producer’s dramatic space-rock tends to evoke the innocence and wonder of this hormonally charged time. Saturdays=Youth is his most explicit celebration yet of how it feels to be dazed, confused and 15 years old. “Saturday is definitely the coolest day of the week for a teenager and that’s the reason Saturday is in the title,” he says, “Saturday always reminds everyone of their youth.”

School of Seven Bells

  • http://www.myspace.com/schoolofsevenbells
  • http://www.schoolofsevenbells.com/
  • Like many bands before them, School of Seven Bells were born as the result of a late-night revelation. Benjamin Curtis connected with sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza in 2004 while their bands—Secret Machines and On-Air Library!, respectively—were on tour. While watching PBS at 3am, Alejandra caught a show about the School of Seven Bells: a mythical South American pickpocket academy that may or may not have existed in the ‘80s. The idea of seven minds working as one appealed to her, as did the phrase’s cryptic musicality, and a creative spark ignited.

    By the end of 2006, Curtis and the Deheza sisters had completely disappeared into School of Seven Bells. From the outset, it was clear that the trio’s music transcended the usual genre restrictions. Early recordings popped up on Sonic Cathedral, Table of Elements, and Suicide Squeeze, then Blonde Redhead tapped School of Seven Bells for a tour. Remixes came from Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie and Prefuse 73, whose “Class of 73 Bells,” a re-imagining of SVIIB’s “Iamundernodisguise,” ended up on his 2007 album Preparations (Warp).

    School of Seven Bells’ music is full of tensions—Curtis’ gentle guitars wrap around jagged beats; silky vocals hide behind grumpy, alien synthesizers—but the resulting songs are effortlessly cohesive, and insidiously catchy. Elements of dream-pop, Afrobeat, IDM, and 4AD’s gauzier moments provide a constantly shifting frame for the Dehezas’ lyrics, which they write as mysterious missives between the School’s imaginary seven members. On their Ghostly debut, Alpinisms, we get the impression that the three seasoned musicians have taken up full-time residence in a dizzying fantasy world; they move freely within the realm of pickpockets and dreamers, composing a soundtrack according to their own odd, beautiful logic.

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Mercury Lounge

217 E. Houston St. (corner Ave A & Houston)

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Hours: Mon–Sat, Noon–7 pm

Music Hall of Williamsburg

66 N. 6th St. (b/w Wythe & Kent)

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Hours: Saturday 11am–6pm

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Manhattan — Brooklyn