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.
Are there any real drums on the album?
Lum: Not really. We’re pretty much using a good sampler with all these multi-sampled hits so you can’t really tell. Then we have processing, too. I try to warm it up; I run it through some plug-ins to give it more of a tape feel. We’re trying to move toward something like a record that was made in the ’70s: real people playing real instruments and writing real songs.
It also seems a little more folk and blues-inspired, less jazzy, with less wah-wah pedal and a lot more slide guitar. What were the musical inspirations for this album? What were you listening to when you were writing and recording this album?
Lum: Probably the stuff we’ve been listening to even before that, when we were making Free and Easy and Windblown Kiss. We’ve just been listening to a lot of what I call the classic era of rock ‘n’ roll, stuff from the early and mid-’70s, like Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye…
Bee: I guess we’ve kind of been studying some of the great albums, listening to how they deal with reverb and how they mix things, soaking it up and trying to integrate it.
Lum: Sometimes you listen to some of these records, like you hear Marvin Gaye singing through this beautiful plate reverb, and all the hair on your neck sticks up and you break out into a sweat.
Bee: Or the old Miles Davis records, especially with Coltrane. That reverb is amazing. They actually had a room reverb, where they’d send the signal out into a room and then bring that reverb back in. I don’t know how we could set it up like that, but we try to imitate some of those things when we’re producing.
Lum: A lot of recording engineers consider the early to mid-’70s the golden era of recording. They can’t make records sound as good as that anymore, even though they have all this really high tech gear, so we’re trying to go for that. We’re trying to make an audiophile kind of record, to really focus on recording, the mic placement, the signal flow, the gear, the pre-amps, stuff like that, to make a really nice-sounding record. A lot of inspiration came from the ’70s across the board: the music, the recording techniques, and the production.
So even though you’re not doing electronic music, you still get to indulge in your gear-head tendencies?
Bee: Lots of geek stuff! [Laughs.]
Lum: That’s how we could pull off the drum situation. We would not have been able to do that in 1973 without having a real drummer, so we take advantage of modern recording techniques. Like ProTools; it can be abused, you can make something sound really crappy in ProTools by compressing it and having all this Auto-Tune, or you can use ProTools like we do, as a tape machine basically (one that you can edit pretty easily).
Bee: And one where the high end doesn’t degrade over time.
Lum: You can play it a thousand times and it’ll sound the same, unlike a tape machine. We try and use the modern gear for what it’s best for, which I think is to make music sound better, not to use Auto-Tune for everything.
Bee: We don’t use Auto-Tune. Maybe not every note is perfect, but it’s not supposed to be, and when you hear it moving to bring the note mechanically into place, it’s really jarring. I think it takes a lot of the emotion out of the music, and that’s one of the things we’re most interested in expressing through music: the emotion, the state of mind as the song was created. We want to preserve as much of that as we can, which is difficult when every track is dubbed in.
Lum: I have to overdub by necessity. It’s something a lot of artists that are trying to make stuff that’s like from the ’70s, like Air, I’ve read are struggling with this whole thing. They have modern gear, but they have to try and keep the soul of the music. We try to walk this balance between making it sound good but not overdoing the perfection.
Bee: With my vocals, I’m trying to do more full takes, instead of ‘OK, I’ll sing this part, then I’ll sing this part.’ I’m trying to give more of a full performance.
It seems like vibe and mood are such an integral part of what you do. What is the ideal setting for someone to hear your songs?
Lum: The way we used to listen to music before iPods were invented. Not to say iPods are bad, but most people I know listen to iPods on the go, in the car or on the bus or subway. I like to listen to the iPod at home; we have a nice stereo system with some Danish speakers that plug into our iPod, and it sounds nice. That’s what I’m saying: a chilled out situation, like we used to do with albums when we were younger.
Bee: Lights off, candles, maybe a little incense or something.
Lum: Pretty much all the music I like is stuff that asks or even demands that you pay attention to it, to take in and appreciate all the nuances. I guess you can listen to our stuff on the subway; it’d probably be kind of cool, to make your own visual soundscape while you travel. When we got the album mastered in Mountain View, we brought it back down, got out of the city, and we were going through Pacheco Pass and said, ‘Now is the time. Let’s pop the CD in!’ We were driving with it, enjoying the beautiful scenery and the music going together.
Bee: When you’re on a long road trip out in the middle of nowhere, you can actually focus and let the music flood your consciousness. Our music isn’t upbeat party music or anything you’d want to listen to with a group of people. That could be awkward, because the music is really sensitive, and most of it’s about love and spirituality, and that’s not really a group endeavor.
Lum: Introspection, I think, is the key word.
Bee: In the past we’ve been accused of making make-out music. I don’t know if this album is as much of a make-out album as the other two. [Laughs.]
Lum: We’ll see what people say.
Bee: We’ve actually gotten e-mails saying like ‘Thanks for the album; I had a fire in the fireplace, a candle burning, and it was just me and my old lady…’ Those are the weirdest e-mails we get. [Laughs.]
Read the rest of the interview on the ReGen Magazine site.
UPDATE 2025: the interview is no longer on the ReGen site, but we found it on the InternetArchive, so here is the rest of our conversation:
You recently performed on Second Life. How did that come about, and how did it go?
Bee: I guess it all goes back to Adam Curry, who started PodShow and was formerly an MTV VJ. He and I are like buddies or whatever, and he’s the one who got me signed on to the PodShow network. He was going off about how great it was, and I had heard about it on G4 or TechTV, so once I knew there was actually someone I knew on there, I thought, ‘OK, I’ll join it.’ I started meeting all these amazing people on there, like Spin Martin, who was the first person to create a record label on Second Life, and performers and other podcasters who are also joining because of Adam Curry. Everywhere I went, everyone asked me, ‘When are you going to perform?’ and ‘Are you performing?’ and I would just be like, ‘No, I’m just here checking it out and getting my bearings.’
Lum: She got lots of pressure to perform.
Bee: And then as the months went by, I was like, ‘Look, we’re going to have to do this.’
Lum: Everyone was pressuring us to perform last year and early this year, and I thought, ‘Let’s perform when we actually have something to promote! Let’s perform when the new album is out.’
Bee: At first I was talking to C.C. Chapman about performing in his U-Turn Cafe, which is a little acoustic venue, but Podshow Island starting putting immense pressure on me, like ‘We’re going to build you this amazing stage and make this huge event out of it.’ They presented this plan to me, and I was like, ‘Well, if C.C. won’t get mad at me, I’ll do it,’ so they got it all set up so that two islands were sharing the band.
Lum: They basically doubled the amount of attendees that could be at the event.
Bee: Which I guess hadn’t been done before. Usually only about 30 people can go, but we are able to have 60 for each parcel with no lag-time and no crashes. Usually if you go to a really well-attended event, if you get in just a few minutes late it’s hard to actually be able to log into the island and you’ll have a lot of audio glitches, but our event was really smooth. I was able to hook up with an animator who does things for live events —his [in-game] name is Paul Gee— and he provided me with an animation so that it actually looked like I was singing, and a microphone, and Ryan was sitting on a little stool with a microphone hooked up to his guitar, and a Vox amp and some speakers. It was really cool. It was fun!
Lum: We decided to keep it acoustic. At first we were sort of thinking half-electric and half-acoustic, but we said, ‘Let’s keep this first one simple and see how it goes.’
Bee: We were pretty nervous about it.
Lum: We didn’t know until afterwards that you didn’t have to log onto Second Life. There was a URL you could have gone to with your Web browser and listened to it anywhere.
Bee: 750 people had been listening. We had no idea!
Lum: So on our next Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcast, our plan is to just put the whole recorded Second Life show up.
While we’re talking about podcasts, you’re involved in the whole podsafe scene. Can you explain what that is for people that aren’t familiar with it?
Bee: It goes back to Adam Curry again. In fact, that’s how I first met him. I knew about his Daily Source Code podcast, but when he announced that he was starting the Podsafe Music Network, we were one of the first bands to join it. The premise is this: at first, when people were podcasting, they’d just do it. It was like the Wild West. No one was doing anything legally; they were just putting it out there. Adam started to realize, ‘Hey, the RIAA could probably come after me for playing all this music; I need a way to have permission from the bands ahead of time so I don’t have to e-mail every individual person and ask them if it’s OK,’ which is what I was doing with my podcast [The Chillcast with Anji Bee]. I’d actually e-mail the bands and wait to see if they’d get back to me. So he set it up so that you’d sign up, and everything you put up there has de facto permission to podcast. The only stipulation is that whoever plays your song has to report back, which is cool because every band wants to know where they were played. You want to know what kind of audience you’re gaining, what songs are popular…
Lum: The bottom line is that with podsafe music, you can play those songs and not have to worry about any licensing.
Bee: I think Adam’s was the very first site to do that, but now there’s the wildly popular Promonet, which is even more corporate, in a way, because they’re working with labels and there’s a lot more promotion involved. We’re on Promonet now, too. And Magnatune embraced the podsafe thing really early on. It’s critical for us podcasters, because it really cuts down on the amount of time that it takes to put together a show.
While we’re talking about legal issues and the music industry, you guys are really involved in podcasting and all these alternate methods of music distribution. What do you think of Radiohead putting out an album that’s ‘donation-optional?’ Do you think it’s just a stunt, or do you think it’s going to take strides toward putting power back in the hands of artists?
Lum: They’re releasing a CD next year, and it’s going to be distributed, something you buy. It’s a good way for them to raise money to put out the CD proper. I think what they’re doing is sincere. I think it’s great. And relating to their particular situation, I thought it was great that you pay what you think it’s worth. Personally, I’m not a huge Radiohead fan, so I’m not going to pay 20 dollars for it. I just wanted to check it out, so I paid zero dollars for it, just to see if you could really do that, to see if they were really putting their money where their mouth is. Sure enough, I got it and listened to it a few times. I think it’s a great thing. In fact, we’re thinking about making our next album digital-only. ‘Long Way from Home’ might be our last CD.
Bee: We’re actually working with a company called Reapandsow that is a digital distributor, and they urge, ‘You don’t have to make CDs,’ but we’re like, ‘Yeah, we do, our fans want to touch it; they want us to sign it and send it to them.’
Lum: But to get back to the second part of your question, what’s going on now is that labels are losing power. A lot of the power is shifting back to the artists, and I think that’s great. Maybe that’ll change what’s been happening to music for the past 10 years, as it’s been released by the majors.
Bee: I think that’s part of why Radiohead did it. It was just like thumbing their noses at the labels.
Trent Reznor did something similar when he found out how much they were charging for his albums in Australia; he told everyone to steal the album.
Bee: I remember when he was putting stuff out on tape; when I had my first fanzine and he was with TVT, they would give us tapes. It’s so weird that he went from Mr. Tape-Trader Guy to this huge popular celebrity, and now he’s like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to bring it back to what it was like before, when things were real.’ In one sense, Radiohead’s idea seems like a really carefully crafted idea, but in another way I think they’re probably just really curious, and want to test it out, see what it’s like, see how dedicated their fan-base is, and also show the label, ‘Look, you guys, we don’t need you! Our fans love us!’
Lum: That’s what I’m saying. You don’t need to have a label anymore. In the glorious ’70s I keep praising, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t record at home. You couldn’t distribute it through iTunes. You couldn’t do anything like that.
Bee: Radiohead’s selling all those albums and getting between one and two dollars per album, so why not get a dollar from your fans per album? It’s the same amount of money, but it’s more honest and more direct.
Lum: And they’re charging 80 bucks for the boxed set, and the CD’s coming out. They’re going to do fine. I’m interested to see how it all pans out over the next five or ten years, if labels are still going to be functioning in the way we’ve grown accustomed to since childhood.
It’s almost like it’s coming back to a grassroots thing; the Internet makes it possible to go directly to the fans without having to have that middleman in between.
Lum: Exactly. You can support the artist directly, or support the things you like, not necessarily even music. You can support local farmers; we go to our farmers’ market, because we like to buy food directly from them. There’s no middleman. Everyone wins. We get better food. They get more money. It’s the same with music; you buy straight from the artist, and not only are you supporting the artist, but there’s a one-to-one relationship. We have a relationship with our fans!
Bee: It’s so much better than sitting back and waiting for a royalty check to come, where you don’t know who bought it or what they thought of it.
Lum: We autograph CDs personally to people.
Bee: People love that. That’s why I think it would be hard to go digital-only. One of our fans was like, ‘Maybe you can sign the cover, scan it in, and then e-mail it.’
Lum: I don’t know if I want to go digital-only, because I love albums. I think they’re the greatest art form. Unfortunately, though, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think it’s something that blossomed for a certain amount of time. The world has changed and unfortunately left that, and I don’t want that to be the case, but I think it is, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Although the two of you have established a very distinct musical identity from Ryan’s first project, Love Spirals Downwards, Projekt is reissuing new versions of several Love Spirals Down albums. Ryan, do you ever listen to that material? What is your impression of your early work, a decade after writing and recording it?
Lum: Well, I don’t ever really sit around and listen to it for pleasure.
Bee: I probably listen to it more than he does.
Lum: But I did have to listen to it pretty intensively for these reissues, because I actually remastered them. I’m proud of it; I don’t cringe when I hear it or anything. What I really notice is the recording quality, and it’s interesting to listen to it and wonder how it might have sounded if I’d had the experience and recording equipment back then that I have today. They might have ended up being very different-sounding albums.
Anji’s been involved in a few other projects over the years, like doing guest vocals for Bitstream Dream. Do either of you have any side projects you’re working on at the moment?
Bee: I just did vocals on a couple of songs by a project called Moosefrog on their new EP. It’s sort of jazzy downtempo. On one song, “En la Oscuridad,” I sing in Spanish, so that was a lot of fun. I love singing in other languages. Their new album, ‘Adrift,’ is totally free to download from Lo-Kiwi.org under Creative Commons, so people can check it out and see what they think.
Was there anything else you’d like to discuss?
Lum: We want to make sure people know that they can come to Lovespirals.com and support us, and if they buy our CDs there, we’ll autograph them.
Bee: And get the free ‘Motherless Child EP.’
Lum: If you buy the CD, you can immediately download the ‘Motherless Child EP.’
Bee: Our band podcast is up there, which you can subscribe to on iTunes, and there’s a link to my podcast, The Chillcast, and I have a vidcast, too.
Lum: Photos, reviews, interviews, lyrics… the Web site is just full-blown. We have everything that you’d ever want to know about Lovespirals.
Bee: And LoveSpiralsDownwards.com helps fill in all the blanks on that. I uploaded a huge archive of PDFs of all the old interviews.
Lum: Concert flyers, blogs -—even before they were called blogs, when they were just news updates I’d send out personally.
Bee: They go back to ’96 or something. It’s all there.
So there’s plenty of reading material?
Lum: And listening material! You can listen to the new album, basically. We have a medley of all 10 songs —-it’s like eight minutes—- and two complete songs that you can listen to all the way through.
Bee: There might even be a Pink Floyd cover or something. And the podcasts are cool, because if you’ve never listened to our podcasts before, you can go back to a year ago and hear us playing bits of the songs as we were creating them.
Lum: We got to share the album progression, like, ‘We’ll take you out this week with a new song we came up with two nights ago.’ You couldn’t do that before.