The following is a transcription of Lovespirals November 9, 2002 interview Iohann Rashi from Frequenicas Alternas airing on Radio Universidad de Puerto Rico stations WRTU 89.7 FM and WRUO 88.3 FM. The questions of the DJ been translated from Spanish to English. Apologies for how rough they are.
Lovespirals is a group that has had a long history and is currently in a process of transformation, formerly known as Love Spirals Downwards. They face a new change, a new facet and new perspectives in their way of creating and producing music. For tonight, listening to the cuts of the album ‘Windblown Kiss,’ we will have Ryan Lum and Anji Bee, the members of Lovespirals, talking to us about this new creation. We will listen to Anji Bee, commenting in a brief and summarized form the historical process that Lovespirals has suffered from Love Spirals Downwards to today with this new production, ‘Windblown Kiss.’
ANJI: Let’s see, Lovespirals first started, I guess, in 1999. Ryan had started working on some solo material with the saxophone player, Doron Orenstein, who appears on our album, ‘Windblown Kiss.’ He was working on some drum and bass club songs. He and I had met through KUCI when I interviewed him for the album ‘Flux’ –I think I also interviewed him somewhat after ‘Ever’ came out– and we kept bumping into each other at different events around L.A. and we had a lot in common. I dunno, somehow he invited me into his studio to show me some of the music he was working on, such as a song called “Beatitude,” which is an instrumental, and the song that later became “Love Survives.” So he played me two tracks and we just kinda started talking about the possibility of me singing on some of his new tracks.
It actually took awhile until we went through with it. The first song I sang on was the song called “Ecstatic,” and we didn’t really do too much with that song. He pressed acetates and started playing them in his DJ sets. We just worked on a few tracks like that and didn’t really send them to Projekt because they weren’t a Projekt style of music. I don’t know… it just kind of evolved over time. Eventually Projekt talked to us about when we were going to make an album and start releasing things, so we started working on material that we thought was more album-oriented, shorter songs with more vocals. I think the first song that we recorded like that was “Oh So Long,” and the next one, I think, was “Dejame” and, you before you know it, we had pretty much made an album and we needed to have a band name and we just stuck with Lovespirals rather than Love Spirals Downwards because that’s kind of what he’d been calling himself.
IOHANN: Ani Bee, in addition to making the second part of the Lovespirals project and being the main voice of this same project. She has worked for a long time as a producer and DJ on a radio station, so we know that Anji has a good experience in radio, which she has had to move to become the voice of Lovespirals.
ANJI: You know it takes a lot of time, as you know, going down to the station and I was the Music Director, I also was doing the program guide, I DJed several shows… I was completely addicted to KUCI. I put a lot of hours and it really kinda chipped away at my time to be writing songs. So I thought, “Well, you know, I think I’m gonna stop promoting other people’s songs and start writing my own for aw hile.” But sometimes I do miss being a DJ, ’cause I love to share music with people.
IOHANN: And you know that we thought of asking Anji to be our DJ of her own program presenting ‘Windblown’ Kiss by Lovespirals. He will now briefly explain the next cut number two of the album ‘Windblown Kiss’ entitled “Dejame,” a cut that is distinguished from the entire production by being a cut sung in the Spanish language. We let Anji Bee, explains this cut to us.
ANJI: The song “Dejame” was really kinda of a turning point, I think, in the recording of the album. We had already recorded “Oh So Long” and knew that we probably were not going to be doing any electronica for a while, because we were so excited to first start playing rock music together. But “Dejame” brought out this whole other side to us that we had never explored, which somewhat harkened back to the early days of Love Spirals Downwards, while updating it in a totally new way, as far as the maturity, the songwriting, and Ryan’s guitar work. We just knew that we had to explore the guitar and voice much more than we had with our earlier electronic stuff.
IOHANN: Anji defines us now a little, what is the concept of the album ‘Windblown Kiss’?
ANJI: You know, Ryan’s always hated to try to define his music and I don’t blame him because every album is fairly different from the last, and he lets a lot of different things influence him, but when we think of the sound of this album, we think of it as being kind of a combination of rock, folk, jazz, and world music, that’s about the best I can come up with. The songs are kind of split evenly between rock and jazz in some ways, but there’s a lot of world influences that I’m sure you’ve noticed, a lot of latin influence, and then, you know, other weird things here and there, a little, you know, kind of country, old time American sounds, and I don’t know, we just kind of went wherever our imagination took us and tried to come up with a lot of different, almost fantasies, and tried to give them life through using different sounds. We didn’t really worry about if we were making a gothic record or an ambient record or anything like that. We just went with wherever inspiration took us, so I think it’s a very eclectic album that’s really hard to define as any one genre. That is kind of something we’ve been struggling with, in a way, because we don’t know, you know, what group of people we’re trying to market the album to, or, you know, what section in the record store it should be filed under, or what genre on mp3.com to call a song, but…
IOHANN: And it really turns out it’s hard to categorize the style and much more the concept of ‘Windblown Kiss,’ because Lovespirals is in a process in which they are mixing different tendencies and styles, and, in fact, Love Spirals Downwards, of course, it was not a project in which it fell into a definition of style, since it could not be considered a Gothic group, it could not be considered a critical and ambient group, and this is due to Ryan Lum, in addition to being the guitarist and musical creator of this project, but his knowledge is also being DJ, and having a great affinity and taste for the music at a time, sounds like the drum and bass, the great influence of L.T.J. Buken, for example, and on the other hand, the seven races, the eclectic races, and even until the influences of certain groups of country and blues, make this influence on Lovespirals, this concept that makes it unique, and precisely speaking of this is that we commented with Anji that, perhaps saddeningly, the music is suffering from this cruel murder, that the discographic industry seeks to put it into place, to put it names to the musical styles and want to catalog them, under certain strict terms, killing totally the meaning and the intention of the music. And precisely as it would be very sad to have only one musical taste, it was necessary to know what influences and tastes of Anji Bee and Ryan Lum.
ANJI: You are so right! I know, music is not supposed to be a marketing strategy, it’s an artistic expression, and Ryan and I can not be just one type of expression. We have a lot of feelings, we’re complex people with a lot of different interests in life and a lot of different things that interest us. It would be like a death to settle for just one thing. You know? Like, if we had just settled for drum and bass, and never made this album. If we had said, “We are a drum and bass band, therefore we can not do anything else,” there would be no ‘Windblown Kiss.’ It would be a sad world if everyone believed they could only like one thing.
ANJI: Well, as you might imagine, after hearing our album, we listen to a lot of different stuff. We were listening to a lot of different things when we were making the album. If I were just to list for you some of the influences I know hit us during the making of ‘Windblown Kiss’ you would probably be surprised. One of the first things that made Ryan pick up his guitar was listening to some old Led Zeppelin records, especially the third album, which is really acoustic. Hearing some of the songs that Led Zeppelin had made, trying to sound like old 30s blues songs, he said that when he was a kid he didn’t appreciate the 30’s blues thing that Zeppelin were trying to go for, but now that he’s gotten into jazz and blues himself, he was really inspired to hear those recordings. For instance, the hidden track at the end of ‘Windblown Kiss’ was definitely inspired in some small part by Led Zeppelin, but also by my love of old 30s and earlier Jazz and Blues. So I was turning Ryan onto a lot of my old records. You know, we were listening to Miles Davis and Billy Holliday and John Coltrane. All of that influenced the Jazz and Blues side of our album. We were also strangely influenced by Chris Isaac, the kind of guitar work that he did on a “Wicked Game,” and an old Robert Plant song called “Big Log.” I think some of that you can feel in the song, “Oh So Long.” We’re also listening a lot to the band called America, to their first album, which is really brilliant. American Folk, 60 Psychedelic. In fact, we covered an America song, the song “You Girl.” It’s kind of an obscure track from one of their mid-80s periods. I don’t think it was a single or anything, but it was just a song that we thought really kind of reflected the style of our music. And we heard something in it that actually reminds us a little bit of the Cockteau Twins and we thought that we could bring that out with our own rendition of it.
IOHANN: However, knowing that after the album Flux and the compilation, ‘Temporal,’ creating a new trend that I hadn’t heard until that time. In that time, ‘Temporal’ marks a facet in which the Lovespirals has influences and sounds of an excellent electronic integration. So, adding a little more about the influences, Anji comments on the electronic sound that influences the Lovespirals.
ANJI: Okay, well, as far as the electronics goes, well, Ryan, when I met him was really, really, really into Good Looking Records. And, you know, LTJ Bukem made a solo album which influenced a lot of our more down-beat electronic stuff. We opted not to put our truly electronic stuff on ‘Windblown Kiss,’ because I don’t know, we wanted to keep the organic feel that was going on with some of the songs of ‘Windblown Kiss’ and it seemed kind of strange to put our downtempo songs right next to it, but, yeah, definitely LTJ Bukem and some of the other bands on that label, like the whole Cookin’ Records series, especially. And, I like a lot of vocal electronics. You know, Olive, Mandalay… I kind of like Morcheeba. I love Everything but the Girl. We both love Everything but the Girl. They’re definitely an influence on us. Oh, Sade’s last album was definitely a huge influence on us. Oh my gosh, there’s so many. Lamb, I love Lamb. I could go on and on. I like a lot of that stuff. Oh, I forgot my favorite band is Soulstice. How can I forget Soulstice? Like, my all-time favorite band. I love them so much. Like, we would love to be on own records alongside Soulstice. That would be my dream. One of the things that I keep wanting to do with the songs from ‘Windblown Kiss’ is to have them remixed in different styles so that they would, you know, there could be electronic versions of the songs. So there’s like the pure form on the album and then remixes –the way that the own bands do. And I have a lot of different people who said they would love to remix it. We just haven’t gotten around to sending out the raw tracks yet. I don’t know if we’ll do that or if we’ll just keep working on our new songs, because we’re already on our way to recording a lot of different songs in different electronics and pop styles. We’re always so busy.
IOHANN: So we’re also asking Ryan Lum. What’s your perspective on the future of Lovespirals? If you think about it, include new projects and new songs. That many of them were out of this album, ‘Windblown Kiss,’ and that they’re already there. But maybe they’re interested in electronic elements. So, you know, a little about the future and also about the past. What’s Ryan’s favorite song from this album, ‘Windblown Kiss’?
RYAN: Well, I’m not sure if it’s a new experiment or anything, but the next step that Anji and I are going to make is going to be different from ‘Windblown Kiss’. I mean, we’re already like four or five songs into making a new album. I’ll tell you that much. You know, it’s going to be different from ‘Windblown Kiss’. Just like ‘Windblown Kiss’ was different from anything else I’d done before. So, you know, I kind of, after seeing the history of this step I’ve made, I try to make each album very different from the ones that have preceded it. And this will be no exception. I mean, this album will be different from ‘Windblown Kiss’. It’ll be, I’ll just give you this much, it’ll be more electronic than ‘Windblown Kiss’. ‘Windblown Kiss’, you know, it’s very, you know, acoustic or very organic, very, you know, human. I’m playing lots of guitars and Anji’s singing all over the place. And I’m playing percussion. I have my friend Doran playing saxophone. You know, it’s almost, you know, a band. You know, almost a real band. Well, I guess I’m the next one will be more like ‘Flux’ in the regard that it’s going to be a little more electronic. It won’t be drum and bass though, like, ‘Flux,’ but it’ll be a little more like that, I guess. But it’ll still have the jazzy stuff that ‘Windblown Kiss’ has. So, you know, it’s going to be a synthesis of many styles.
IOHANN: This way we get to the end of this presentation of the album ‘Windblown Kiss’ by Lovespirals. We want to thank you infinitely for the invaluable participation of Anji Bee, Ryan Lum, Sam Rosenthal of Projekt Records, Angelouis Cruz, en la dirección técnica y crevasión de la misma. Producción, Yohan Roshi.