Tag Archives: Lovespirals

Interview

Iprong Magazine Feature Lovespirals

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The April 2nd “100% Podsafe” issue of iProng Magazine features an interview with Anji discussing Lovespirals, going podsafe, getting into podcasting, music licensing, live performance vs studio recording, and much more. Also included this issue is a great article on eMusic vs Amazon downloads, interviews with fellow podsafe artists Geoff Smith and Natalie Gelman, and an article with Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes, who released their new single to the Podsafe Music Network.

100% PodSafe Edition, iProng Magazine Artist Feature on Lovespirals

For someone who isn’t familiar with Lovespirals, how would you describe it to them?

Lovespirals is the musical duo of multi-instrumentalist and producer, Ryan Lum, and me — Anji Bee — the vocalist, lyricist and co-producer. We write and record all of our music together in our own home studio. As such, our music has a very intimate feel. Our sound doesn’t follow any particular genre model, instead, we play what we feel at the moment. We tend towards very melodic, bittersweet, and dreamy music that focuses on beautiful vocal harmonies and soulful guitar work, with liberal sprinklings of electric piano.

There’s always been a sort of tug of war in Lovespirals between jazzy electronica and folky rock. Each of our releases have come upon a different solution to this tension between the modern and vintage sides of our musical personalities. One the one hand, we both love the old vinyl albums we grew up with as kids, but on the other, we’re drawn to contemporary music and production techniques. The interesting thing about this is that while the casual listener assumes a song like “Caught in the Groove” from Long Way From Home was recorded with a full band, in actuality Ryan programmed the drums using a keyboard controller and samples, the piano is recorded with midi, and the guitars and bass were performed one track at a time in ProTools.

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Band News

More ‘Long Way From Home’ Reviews

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Reviews are still popping up of Lovespirals’ recent album, Long Way From Home, in partial thanks to the efforts of Ariel PR who helped to push the album when it was released this past October 23rd.

Miles Klee said in Hot Indie News:

Bluesy slide guitar work sometimes shades over into Santana-like finger-meandering, and vocalist Anji Bee’s layered voice paints bright glaze over already dreamy arrangements. It’s as though the glancing disaffection of 80’s and 90’s dream-poppers has been filtered through an AM radio, a mutation that works by dint of sounding completely natural on an evolutionary view.

From the Green Arrow Radio blog:

More than melancholic music, there is a sense that they traveled with you on similar & familiar roads with the radio tuned to the same left of the dial station in the middle of wherever. After nearly a decade of artistic collaboration between singer/songwriter, Anji Bee, & multi instrumentalist & producer, Ryan Lum, it is no wonder that they have managed to put together an album of answers to questions yet asked with a subtle sultry sense of sound security.

The Celebrity Cafe‘s Ray Anderson mused:

Empty and sad, but of full of emotion, their album Long Way from Home is medicine for those that dig the alternative. How can you take a gut-wrenching classic like “Motherless Child” and make it sadder? Let the “Lovespirals” get a hold of it. It’s easy to fall into the loose, country-tinged groove of “Caught in a Groove” and let your soul be taken for a ride. By the time the “upbeat” “Lovelight” comes on, you won’t mind being “A Long Way from Home,” and I think you’ll want to stay there.

Audio, Interview

Lovespirals ‘Long Way From Home’ Feature Podcast

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In this extended episode of the Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcast, Ryan and Anji play every song from their Long Way From Home as they discuss how the album was created. In this special behind-the-scenes podcast, the duo discuss their new album’s influences, song writing process, and production secrets, while giving you great peek into the album!

You can subscribe to Chillin’ with Lovespirals on just about any podcast app including Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Deezer, and JioSaavn. 

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Band News, Review

Re:Gen Magazine Reviews Long Way From Home

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By Matthew Johnson

On their third album, Lovespirals shift away from overt electronica in favor of beautiful, understated folk and blues ballads.

If sophomore album Free and Easy saw Lovespirals’ sound at its biggest, Long Way from Home is the duo’s most intimate, forsaking house beats and jazz flourishes for understated slide guitar and acoustic strums. Ryan Lum’s production is more mature than ever before; unless you really listen for it, you won’t be able to tell that he plays and records all the instruments himself – maybe not even then – and the drums sound warm and clear, betraying no hint of sampler or sequencer. Instead, Lum lets his arrangements take center stage, with emotive guitar solos harmonizing with electric organ on the bluesy ballad “Once in a Blue Moon” and relaxed acoustic strums highlighting jazzy piano chords on “Nocturnal Daze.” Anji Bee’s vocals are beautifully languid, the sweetness swathed in melancholy on the plaintive “Caught in the Groove,” adorned by floating background harmonies on “Treading the Water,” and sensual yet dreary on the pair’s stark rendition of classic spiritual “Motherless Child.” Fans of the pair’s more overtly romantic material will appreciate unabashed love song “This Truth,” and there’s even a hint of the ethereal dreaminess of Lum’s previous project, Love Spirals Downwards, on the fuzzy overlapping guitar tones and meandering vocals of “Sundrenched” and “Lazy Love Days.”

It’s not an understatement to call Long Way from Home the duo’s most accomplished work up to date; as enjoyable as their previous explorations of laidback electronica and jazz fusion have been, this album captures Lum and Bee’s warm musical chemistry in a way that previous releases only hinted at.

View the original review at Re:Gen Magazine.

Band News

Music Tap Featured Artist for December

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Matt Rowe reviews Long Way From Home for Music Tap, 11/28/2007

The evolution of Lovespirals into the band that they are today has been a long road. From the band’s early years as Love Spirals Downwards — with a vocalist all-but-forgotten for Anji Bee’s lovely, dreamy, and expansive vocal pleasantries — to their current album, Lovespirals have always been a band of change. Their latest, the wonderfully titled Long Way From Home, is one of superior work and can easily rank as the band’s best work in either incarnation.

Still a part of the Dream-Pop sound that formed them, the Anji Bee years of Lovespirals have been an essential element for the band. With her ability to wrap around Ryan Lum’s musical explorations, Lovespirals is not afraid of trying on new clothes, framing them in gorgeous soft tones of various flavours. The album begins with a “career-best” blues song that accentuates the album’s direction. “Caught in the Groove” is a beautifully produced, dream-blues (if I may coin the phrase) song. Using a song as a metaphor for the deterioration of a relationship, this captivating tune is made all the more extraordinary by Lum’s blues guitar.

That same bluesy guitar shows up in “Once in a Blue Moon, and “Nocturnal Daze.” Ryan Lum’s guitar leads have a distinct ’70s feel throughout the album. Some songs recall the past musical history of the band. “Sundrenched” lends itself to the stream of that past. The album closes with the excellent musically and lyrically sex-soaked “Lazy Love Days.”

The needle may be “caught in the groove” but, for me, that’s a good thing where this album is concerned.

View the original post at MusicTap.net

Band News

Idylls Remastered Reissue #1 on Projekt.com!

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The Projekt.com Top 10 currently lists the brand new Love Spirals Downwards – Idylls Remastered Reissue at the #1 spot, followed closely by Love Spirals Downwards – Ardor Remastered Reissue at #3. Trailing slightly behind is the new Lovespirals – Long Way From Home (which was actually released by Chillcuts, not Projekt) at the #8 position and Lovespirals – Windblown Kiss — which Projekt released back in 2002 — at #9. With the #5, #6, and #10 albums being comps that include tracks by Love Spirals Downwards and Lovespirals, as well, I guess you could say that I’m pretty much dominating the Projekt charts this week!

Interview

Re:Gen Magazine Interview Lovespirals

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The Golden Age of Chill by Re:Gen Magazine Assistant Editor, Matthew Johnson

For a band so enmeshed in ’70s-era recording aesthetics, Lovespirals’ Anji Bee and Ryan Lum are undeniably on the cutting edge of modern technology. Early adopters of podcasting technology, the pair are aligned with Adam Curry’s PodShow network as well as the nascent podsafe movement. They also recently made their virtual reality debut with a live show in the Second Life online community, and are eager about the Internet’s role in the music industry’s uncertain new era. Get them talking about the music itself, though, and it’s all about the warm sounds of ’70s records. Bee and Lum’s newest release, Long Way from Home, largely abandons the house and downtempo electronic currents of previous releases Windblown Kiss and Free and Easy — not to mention the ambient drum ‘n’ bass predilections Lum explored with his previous project, top-selling Projekt act Love Spirals Downwards — in favor of a more acoustic approach. If the technology is less overt, however, it’s no less an integral part of Lovespirals’ music. As Lum and Bee explain to ReGen, it takes a lot of technique to produce an album on ProTools that sounds like it was recorded in the days of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Lum also tells us about revisiting his early work by remastering new editions of Love Spirals Downwards’ first two albums, Idylls and Ardor, and Bee talks about keeping things real in the age of Auto-Tune.

Let’s start by talking about your new album, Long Way from Home. The electronic elements are a lot more understated than on Free and Easy. Was there a conscious decision to step away from electronica to focus on more traditional instruments?

Lum: Big time! There’s really no electronics, unless you count the Rhodes piano. I think three or four songs have Rhodes, some a lot of Rhodes, some just a little bit. I don’t know if that makes it electronica. I just see it as a popular ’70s instrument that got re-popularized.
Bee: Bands like Zero 7 and Air have really re-popularized Rhodes, so it’s easy to think of Rhodes as being an electronica thing. I’m happy to let it slide; if we’re considered ‘downtempo’ because of the Rhodes, that’s fine. We did basically record the same way as Free and Easy; we used ProTools, and the drums are not real drums.
Lum: It may not sound like it, but I’m using all the production techniques I’ve learned over the years, making Free and Easy, or before that making drum ‘n’ bass or house or whatever. We’re using the same techniques, but we’re trying to make more acoustic records with the same gear.
Bee: It’s like we’re disguising the techniques.
Lum: You can make a drum machine sound all electronic, but we’re trying to make it sound as human as possible. In fact, I’m hoping you can’t even tell it’s not a real guy playing a real drum.

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Band News

Preorder Lovespirals’ New Album ‘Long Way From Home’

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My current band, Lovespirals, has finished our 3rd album, Long Way From Home, and are now taking pre-orders. While the official release date is scheduled for October 23rd, we will mail out personally autographed copies of the new CD as soon as they become available. Plus, there’s a remix EP that you’ll get immediately as digital download with every order placed through the Lovespirals Webstore.

For fans of my older Love Spirals Downwards music, this new album should please you. I’ve gone back to making guitar based music and there’s a dark dreamy feel to it that’s reminiscent of Ardor and Ever. I think it’s my finest work yet. You can listen to a medley of the entire album and a full song or two on the album page for Long Way From Home.

Band News

Projekt 200 3-CD Set Features New Song

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Lovespirals’ brand new song, “Empty Universe,” from our upcoming CD, Long Way From Home — as well as “Write in Water” from the upcoming remastered reissue of Love Spirals Downwards‘ Ardor — are included on the new boxed set compilation, Projekt 200. A celebration of the 200th release for Projekt, the three era collection includes 32 songs from the label’s 24 year history. This limited edition DVD-sized “DVStar” package with an 8-page booklet and 3-CDs will be available in stores Sept 25th, but you can buy it at projekt.com now.

Projekt 200 3-CD Boxed Set

Yes! As hard as it is to imagine, PROJEKT now has 200 releases. 24 years in the making, I put together this 3-CD compilation covering three distinct parts of the Projekt sound: The Early Years, The Current Era, and Ambient Loop. Packaged in a beautiful DVD-Sized “DVStar” package, this is a limited edition release full of love and passion. I have been thinking, for many years, about how to represent the label, when we turned 200….I went through the Projekt catalog and picked some of my favorite songs which represent all aspects of “the projekt sound.” 

There are also new tracks, recorded just for PROJEKT200.. Tearwave recorded the gorgeous “Comfort in Angel’s Wings.” I recorded a new Black Tape For A Blue Girl song, “I Strike You Down,” with Elysabeth on vocals, and featuring some nice guitar textures from Doug of Tearwave. There’s a brand new track from Lovespirals returning to the dream-pop sound people love in Ryan’s work. There are also unreleased ambient/electronic tracks from Alio Die, Fear Falls Burning and Vidna Obmana. 

PROJEKT200 also includes a brand new mix of Black Tape For A Blue Girl’s “Across A Thousand Blades” plus a Steve Roach track that is not actually on Projekt at all (it’s from one of his Timeroom releases): “In The Eyes Of Noche” which features some of my piano as well as ethereal female vocals. 

I am very excited and proud to present this overview of the label, as we prepare to enter our 25th year!

— Sam Rosenthal, Projekt.com