The Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcast was recently relaunched and the band are busy archiving past episodes including Ryan’s 2023 chat about the Flux Deluxe Edition. This ten minute audio show goes into detail about how Ryan remastered the original mixes that were used in both the expanded digital release, as well as the vinyl album — which hadn’t been organized yet at the time of recording. Stream the show here, or via your favorite podcasting service including Spotify, Apple, Amazon, iHeart, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Deezer, and JioSaavn.
TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO:
Flux Deluxe Edition Chat September 1, 2023
Hey, this is Ryan of Love Spirals Downwards and Lovespirals. And I have some really exciting news to share with you. This past August 11th (2023), we released the 25-year anniversary of our classic 1998 album ‘Flux’. In fact, we released it on the exact date of the 25th anniversary. So I thought I’d take a few moments to talk to you about ‘Flux: Deluxe Edition’, out now on all digital platforms. So in addition to this being a completely new remastering of the original nine ‘Flux’ tracks, I think the most exciting part of this remastered release are the dozen bonus tracks, most of which have never seen the light of day ever before.
So fortunately for all you Love Spirals Downwards fans out there, and for me, I’ve been storing all my DAT tapes. Those are digital audio tapes. That’s what we used to mix down our albums onto back then. So yeah, Anji, my partner in life, she’s my wife and my singer in Lovespirals, she actually was going through the tapes and found the original nine songs for ‘Flux’, you know, the nine core songs. But in addition to that, she found a plethora of unreleased songs from the ‘Flux’ era, all these songs that for some reason or another didn’t make it to ‘Flux’ or any other remixes or anything like that. And I’m figuring, well, why let these songs just die on these DAT tapes and never have anyone hear them? Because I was surprised. I haven’t heard most of these songs since 1998, and I was shocked about how good these songs were, and I was really excited to share these with you guys.
So speaking of these old DAT tapes, this ‘Flux: Deluxe Edition’ almost never happened. These old DAT tapes from the late ’90s have, I guess, slowly been dying over time, and maybe my old DAT machine, too. Yeah, I’ve saved my same digital audio tape machine. I’ll take a picture. It’s a big old crazy-looking thing. Anyway, I was having tons of technical issues getting the songs transferred from the DAT machine over to the computer in which I was going to master them on. There were problems with the tapes themselves, problems with the DAT machine. In fact, I had to go to a friend of ours, Nick. Thank you so much for loaning me your DAT machine! I transferred some songs using his different brand of DAT machine. But yeah, long story short, it was just hairy. There were several times where I thought, “Wow, I’m going to get most of the songs, but I’m not going to get all of them.” But I was persistent. I wanted to make sure I got this done and got it done right. And all the songs are here safely, so if all my DAT tapes and machines die now, everything’s good.
Back in 1998, I went up to visit my good friend and mastering engineer, Robert Rich, and he mastered the album. I was sitting there with him, learning how he does it, and I picked up stuff over the years. I’ve had him master most of my albums since then. Fortunately for me, I had those original nine mastered mixes of Robert’s to use as my reference for beginning this remastered reissue of ‘Flux’. And I have to say it’s very challenging to try to match up –or even dare try to improve– what Robert did, because he did such a fine job on the 1998 mastering. So my job was not to say, “Oh, I’m going to make it even better,” or anything like that. I just tried to make a really nice mastering for the modern digital world, for streaming, and this is not a CD release. Yeah, this has to be a digital-only release. There’s just way too many minutes with all the extra bonus tracks for this to fit on any non-digital medium. It’s 147 minutes in total, so it won’t fit on CD, it won’t fit on vinyl or cassette. So this will forever remain a digital-only release.
Similarly to how I took the original audio for the nine ‘Flux’ tracks and just tried to make slight improvements for the modern age, the same thing happened with the cover art. If you’ve seen the photo, the original 1998 cover photo from Stewart Gow, if you’ve seen it on any of the streaming platforms, I don’t know what happened, but somehow it’s all murky on these platforms. It’s just not very crisp or beautiful. So one thing Anji strived for with this reissue is to improve that situation, and I think she’s done a wonderful job. It looks fantastic on all the streaming platforms. Anji actually tried to get me to make this ‘Flux’ remaster five years ago for the 20th anniversary. But anyway, here we are at 25. Hey, five more, five better, right?
But anyway, when we were going through the tracks a few years back, I found some of the audio sounds and samples that we used in the original recordings. And the one that had the most complete files was the song known as “I’ll Always Love You”. And I said, “Hmm, wow, I’m so glad this bass line is here!” because there’s no way I could recreate that and some of the other sounds. So I pulled them into my digital audio workstation and started playing with it because it was so fun to have those original files back to work with. And that started our new remake of that song –which we call now just “Misunderstood”– me and Anji reinterpreting an old Love Spirals Downwards classic, keeping true to the spirit of the original song and putting our own new unique interpretations into it. And I’m super happy with how it came out.
Another little-known fact is that this ‘Flux’ remaster almost had two fewer songs. When I thought I was done, I handed it over to Anji, showed her all the songs, all my work. She said, “Wait, you left out two of them.” I said, “Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.” I had those files, but I didn’t remaster them because I thought they were already out there in the world. Two songs were already on Love Spirals Downwards ‘Temporal’, which was an album released in 2000, a kind of career retrospective. But she said, “Well, if you want this to be the complete ‘Flux’ everything, you should get those on there,” and she was right. Not everyone owned ‘Temporal’, not everyone was aware of these two songs. ‘Temporal’ has kind of been out of print for a while. So now we have the full complete ‘Flux’ bibliography here.
And of the many bonus tracks on ‘Flux: Deluxe Edition’, there’s one that totally stands out, totally unique. It’s different from all the rest because it was not recorded in our studio during the ‘Flux’ era. It was a song we performed live at the Projekt Festival in Chicago, and we performed this song from ‘Flux’ before ‘Flux’ even came out. So this was the first time anyone outside of our bedroom studio ever heard the song.
And speaking of our 1997–1998 Love Spirals Downwards studio, ‘Flux’ stands out as the album where I started making music in a completely different manner than I had for all my years prior to that. It was the first year I started introducing some digital audio technology into the recording setup. So I was able to do what people just take for granted now on their computers, doing some copy and pasting of vocals and other instruments. So it allowed us to get way more creative and experimental with how we produced music. In the old days, you had eight tracks of tape, that’s what we had, and you just put a mic in front of the singer, let her sing, and that’s it. If you want another part, you have to layer another part on top. So for ‘Flux’, we were able just to record little bits if we wanted to, or big chunks. Either way, we could process them any way we want. We could paste them all over, we could loop them. I could find something she recorded eight months ago and put it on a brand new song we’re working on. So yeah, ‘Flux’ was a technological breakthrough for us.
And speaking of reusing vocals that were recorded in the past, we even used some that were recorded in the way distant past, back in 1992, when we were working on ‘Ardor’, the song “Sunset Bell”. That’s the song that closes out the nine core songs on ‘Flux’. I took some of Jennifer Ryan’s vocals off there and processed them in a new way and produced the 1998 version of “Sunset Bell” from that.
I’m sure something many people wonder about ‘Flux’ is why is Kristen Perry, Suzanne’s sister, is on two of the songs. It’s a really simple reason. Those were two songs that I was really excited about. I really wanted them to be on ‘Flux’, but for some reason or another, Suzanne had some creative blockages with those songs. She just really couldn’t come up with anything that she was satisfied with. But I didn’t want those songs to die and become one of these weird bonus tracks or anything like that. So anyway, I was determined they had to come out. I knew they were great songs. So I had worked with her sister before, before Love Spirals Downwards started. We made a song or two. So I said, “All right, Kristen, you want to try working on a couple songs with me that Suzanne had trouble with?” And that’s how that came about.
One interesting fact about ‘Flux’, the song “Psyche” featuring Kristen Perry was played quite prominently on the TV show ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ and that was the first time I ever had any music of mine played on major television. I remember back when ‘Flux’ came out in 1998, there was a bit of anxiety releasing that, both for me and for Projekt Records, because it was quite different than anything I’d released before and vastly different from anything Projekt is known for. They’re known for ambient, ethereal, gothic, and this is like a pop drum and bass kind of influenced record. So fortunately, at the time, it did really well. It’s one of our best-selling albums as Love Spirals Downwards, and right now in the modern digital streaming age, it’s our most popular, most streamed record.
Another cool ‘Flux’ tidbit is that last year DJ Bored Lord played our song “Alicia” on their early hours DJ mix on Apple Music. And speaking of DJs, this is my first release ever on the DJ sites Juno Download and Beatport.
You see that guitar sitting there behind me? That’s my Ibanez Talman. I think I got it around 1996, 1997, and that is the main guitar I used on ‘Flux’.
So I really hope you learned a few new things about ‘Flux’ and Love Spirals Downwards, and I really hope you check out this ‘Flux: Deluxe Edition’ that I spent so much time on. I haven’t talked about how many months I spent working on this to get it polished, sounding beautifully, all the songs transferred, like I said, safely, so that we can all enjoy these songs for the rest of eternity, as long as all the streaming services pay their bills and keep the electricity on.
So anyway, guys, thanks for listening. Thanks for being fans all these years. We had a great time with the listening party on Bandcamp, seeing so many faces or names that we haven’t seen in so long. People have been following us for literally decades, and it means a lot to me that I’ve been able to be a part of your lives musically all these years and decades. That’s really what keeps me going. That’s all the inspiration I need, guys. So thanks so much. Keep listening. Make sure you’re subscribed to our social media, our channel here, and we’ll see you soon with some more Love Spirals Downwards content.