Alejandra deheza biography of donald
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Some New Yorkers were terrified when Hurricane Irene hit the city last month. Alejandra Deheza was mesmerized. The heavy winds were nothing like Hurricane Andrew, which devastated southern Florida, where she lived as a kid in the early ’90s. They were more like the lyrics she wrote for her electronic-rock grupp, School of Seven Bells, in songs like “Windswept” and “Dust Devil” and “Joviann,” which contains the line “The night begins as a roving wind that summons the earth from beneath my feet.” When she heard the wind, Deheza woke up at 4 a.m. and stared out the öppning of her Brooklyn apartment.
“I love storms anyway,” says Deheza, who sings and plays gitarr in the New York duo with guitarist Benjamin Curtis. “It was the gorgeous spectacle happening, as opposed to something terrifying.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever looked up the Orishas at all. It’s this Yoruba religion. It’s not my r
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In 2007, School of Seven Bells snatched their name from a South American pickpocketing school. Their music has that sly effect of its namesake; it buzzes by you (all synth and strong whispers and bass lines) and catches you totally off guard.
This most recent album, SVIIB, is their fourth and last. In 2013, Alejandra Deheza announced that the other half of the band, Benjamin Curtis, had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He died on December 29 of that year, after recording his last piece of music—a cover of Joey Ramone’s “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up)”, about his battle with the same cancer.
While most of SVIIB had been recorded in the summer of 2012, Deheza took some time away from the album before working with Beck’s musical director and M83’s producer, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, to bring this final work to light. It’s less of a memorial than a shrine: It takes the past and pulls it all forward into a present, euphoric peace. We spoke to Deheza about Curtis, musical obsessions
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I first met singer, guitarist, keyboardist, and lyricist Alejandra Deheza outside Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her School of Seven Bells comrade Benjamin Curtis. They were filing in for a DJ gig. I was sleepy and killing time in Brooklyn, sick as a dog from a trip to Mexico City where I had just seen U2 two nights in a row among a crowd whose native language wasn’t English, yet were screaming every word of every song.
I stopped Deheza and Curtis to tell them how much I loved their music and share pictures of the U2 show with them. I showed Deheza a small slip of paper printed in Spanish given to me by Catholic missionaries outside the U2 show. Deheza, half-Costa Rican, half-Bolivian, and born in Guatemala, translated. Without getting a close look at it, she picked out the phrase, “Feel the spirit coursing through you.”
We exchanged a few laughs and pleasantries, and I asked what time they’d start spinning after some opening acts. I went to ge