I hear the word shoegaze thrown around a lot when describing your music. What’s your relationship with whatever people want to pin your genre down as?
Well, for me, usually when people are saying shoegaze, it’s because they really like it. So I really don’t have a problem with it, as long as it’s something that they really like, and they’re comparing us to it, then it’s fine (laughs). It’s hard to take it personally, because you can’t really tell somebody how to hear something. If that’s what they hear that’s what they hear and if they like it, I can’t complain.
So you don’t see it as your job to describe your music to other people?
It’s kind of hard to describe for me. For me, I would just say there’s a lot of textures, lot of melodies and harmonies, and there’s beats.
There’s rhythm, and melody, and harmony…
And beats (laughs). See, obviously I wouldn’t be very good at it.
Tell me about enlisting Justin Broadrick to remix ‘Face To Face On High Places.’
We were asked to give a little wishlist for remixers and he’s definitely one of them, just our favorite people, musicians and stuff. I really like what he does, and I’m really glad he said yes, and that’s the song he picked.
Did you meet him while you were in England?
No! I think he lives in Wales and we did a radio session in Cardiff and Bristol is right by there, maybe an hour away. We were thinking of calling him, but I don’t know if that ever happened.
I don’t know how I would answer this, but I saw a quote from the Edge had said something to the effect that he was inspired by your drony sounds—not sure of the exact words—for the new U2 record. How does that feel?
That’s incredibly awesome, is the only way I can answer that. It was weird because all of a sudden people were emailing us all of these really great things that he would say in interviews. I know that he’s been following Benjamin for a while. It’s incredible. You can’t buy that (laughs). It’s nuts. Him just talking about your band, it’s crazy how many people read that, and I feel that maybe a lot of people tried out the record because of that and I think that’s really cool. He doesn’t have to do that, and it was really nice.
School Of Seven Bells perform at Bowery Ballroom on June 12. For more info, visit schoolofsevenbells.com.
