April 2001, MacNETv2, Chris Volpe

Chris: Why the Mac platform and not Windows?

Ryan: Actually, we do have one Windows machine, a Compaq, that we use as the server for the studio and house. I’m interested in getting Mac OSX server one day, but I don’t have a spare Mac that I can use as a server right now. But back to your question, there are many reasons why we use Macs. The biggest one is that I enjoy working on them. When there is a problem, I can most often figure out what’s wrong and fix it myself, while PCs seem more complicated in that regard. I like the plug and play ease of use that Macs have. There’s nothing worse than trying for hours and days to get hardware working. Plus, Apple continues to create the most innovative products. If I had enough money, I’d go out today and buy the new flat panel G4 iMac for the office, an iBook for lighter work and playing games, a Titanium PowerBook for doing live shows, and a 1 ghz G4 to run a ton of audio plug ins in my studio. I can’t say that I want to rush out there and buy a copy of Windows XP.

Chris:: Do Macs enhance your creativity in any way?

Ryan: I don’t know if Macs make me more creative, but as far as computers go, they’re the least obtrusive in letting me get on with my creative work in the studio without being forced into thinking like a computer. You just point, click, drag, and don’t have to worry about anything else with regards to the computer. I see computers as a tool, a tool you use to get things done. I think Macs are by far the best platform for anyone who does music or graphics. Also for getting photos, mp3s, and video into and out of your computer, nothing can compete with Macs and all the new Apple software like iTunes, iMovie, and iPhoto. But if you’re a more nerdy C++ or ASP programmer, I’d say PCs are the way to go and a Mac wouldn’t be the right tool at all.

Chris:: Tell me some things about the new CD that you’d like the readers to know. How’s this recording different?

Ryan: This is the first time that I’ve had the recording quality that I’ve always wanted. The whole thing was recorded and mixed to 24 bit. In the past 4 or so years, the technology and cost have finally come together to allow truly great quality digital recordings. Still, you need to have the engineering and production skills, as well as good microphones and outboard gear, to take full advantage of it.

Anji: One of the most striking things about this album, for fans of the Lovespirals stuff Ryan and I did during 1999-2000, is that this is not an electronica album. We were doing drum ‘n’ bass club mixes when we first started collaborating, and that’s what we’ve been promoting online, and releasing on various compilations CDs. Our upcoming album, however, is guitar based listening music, with a very organic feel. I think some people will be surprised.

Chris:: Can you tell us anything interesting about how you used Macs to make it, and what software was involved?

Ryan: On “I Can’t See You”, the last song of our new album, there’s a brushed jazz drum kit that plays through the song. It sounds very real, and that’s because it was taken from a recording of a real performance. I ran the original recording — which was performed at a tempo too fast for my song — through Recycle, which sliced it up into smaller files. Then I sent those files to my sampler to playback in ProTools at my song’s correct tempo. This is a trick that electronic producers, particularly breakbeat ones, do often. I used it, instead, for a straight up bebop jazz song, and it worked perfectly. When you listen to the final outcome, you’d never guess that the drums were the result of so much technological manipulation.

Chris:: Can you please describe the process a typical song might go through from start to finish before it makes it onto a CD or the Web?

Anji: The way our dance tracks were written is completely different from how we wrote our album. The drum ‘n’ bass tunes were all sample and loop based, so we basically began with a break beat, worked up the rhythm sections, then added melodies, and finished them off with vocals. I wasn’t as involved in the songwriting process for those songs as I am now. I like making samples, so in several instances I found sounds for Ryan to work with, which he appreciated since that can be a really time consuming effort. I also gave writing suggestions and production assistance, but I was much more of a backseat driver then than I am now. I never really learned much about midi composing or Cubase, and that’s what he was using back then, in our old studio setup.

‘Oh So Long’ was the first song to break the old songwriting mold completely. That was written shortly after we set up our current studio, utilizing ProTools. Basically we were listening to some sax that our partner, Doron Orenstein, had recorded for us to use as sample food, looking for a good starting point. We started noticing certain bluesy passages that we liked, so we cut and pasted a few together, then let that loop play in ProTools, while Ryan started working out some chords on guitar. I was inspired to start singing along, so I found some lyrics I had written beforehand and joined in. The energy was really fantastic! We just kept jamming it until we had a clear verse and chorus defined. After that was settled, Ryan went into ProTools to lay down his basic guitar part and the sax. I’m not sure if the bass came next, or if we launched right into the vocal recording, but it all happened pretty fast. Then it was just a matter of filling in the song with percussion and additional guitar, including the solo work.

That song pretty much set a precedent for the rest of the album, as well as being the inspiration for us to continue to work with guitar. The whole feeling of writing the song together with guitar and vocals was very energizing for us. I had a whole huge backlog of lyric and vocal ideas stashed away so that any time I heard him strum a chord, I’d just kinda pop up and start singing. It became a bit of joke, really! He’d be practicing a new Jazz chord or mode then suddenly he’d hear me singing along, and be like ‘Oh no! Not again!’ I think we have half another album’s worth of demo ideas still left over.

Chris:: How long did the latest release take to produce?

Anji: The first song was written in July of 2001, and the last song was completed in January 2002. We did the bulk of the songwriting over the summer of 2001, then kinda slowed down a bit. Still, I guess it was all done in 6 months, which is amazing considering each of the 4 Love Spirals Downwards albums took Ryan about a year and a half to produce.

Chris:: Were the earlier Love Spirals Downwards recordings created with Macs too?

Ryan: No, they were recorded on analog tape recording gear and mixed down to DAT. The midi sequencing for flux was done on a Quadra 605 using Cubase, but the rest was recorded to analog and mixed down to DAT. I mastered flux on a Mac setup, at Robert Rich’s studio, which is where we also mastered the new album.

Chris:: You’re part of a digital music revolution, in a way, aren’t you?

Anji: Most definitely. It is rather fascinating to be at the head of a new trend in the music industry, to actually see the seeds of the future being planted, and to be able to watch those ideas grow and mature. Neither of us would ever have believed in the 80’s that we would one day have our very own 24 track digital recording studio, that’s for sure!

Chris:: What would things be like if you didn’t have digital music stuff at your disposal- what would you have to do to be able to do what you do now?

Anji: Whoa, I don’t even want to think about what a hassle it would have been for us to do our album without our current setup! All throughout the process we would come back to the thought that we have so much more control in the ProTools environment than either of us have had in any other studio setting. I had worked with ADAT back when that technology came out, and I thought that those were really cool, but compared to hard disc recording on a good system, they seem like behemoths!

CHRIS: How are Macs – and things like MP3.com – allowing you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do?

Anji: Our Macs have made it very easy for us to get involved in new online services like MP3.com; I create our MP3s with iTunes, after all. I love MP3s! I’m constantly finding new bands that I like on MP3.com and other services like BeSonic and IUMA. The media has really focused on the illegal MP3 trade, which is too bad, because there is also a thriving community of artists who freely share their music through that same format, as well as artists who actually make a little money selling their music that way. Lovespirals have been giving free MP3s away for about 2 years now.

Before the rise of MP3s, you were stuck using RealAudio, which isn’t nearly as nice sounding or user-friendly. RA seemed pretty cool at first, as a way to at least get the idea of the music across, but it was still pretty clunky. Ryan briefly started switching over to QuickTime files when Temporal was released, but now it’s all about mp3s.

March 17, 2000 RadioSpy Interview by Sean Flinn:

“Indie goths gone electronic, LSD’s sound now sketches its past while tracing its future.”

“We’re the first and only for a lot of things on Projekt,” says Ryan Lum, the multi-instrumentalist and driving force behind Love Spirals Downwards, darkwave label Projekt Record’s top-selling act. Lum is sipping on a soda in a RadioSpy conference room and choosing his words carefully. He’s speaking of his band’s use of saxophone riffs on a song from its latest release, Temporal, a career retrospective that includes a number of unreleased tracks. Lum was concerned that Sam Rosenthal, Projekt Record’s sometimes finicky founder, might be less than enthusiastic about the sax track.

“[Rosenthal] actually made a positive comment about the saxophone. He said, ‘You know, it fits somehow,” recounts Anji Bee, Ryan’s self-described “partner-in-crime” and recent collaborator on everything from album art to vocals. Lum’s experimentation — with his sound and with the band’s direction — initially met with grudging acceptance from Rosenthal, who eventually warmed to the band’s new sound.

“It’s not his cup of tea,” Lum says of Rosenthal’s reaction to the band’s shift in sound from “shoegazer,” the ethereal style of feedback- and synth-drenched pop defined by British bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and the Cocteau Twins, to drum ‘n’ bass. “But we more or less have artistic freedom to do as we please. I guess being the top seller on the label doesn’t hurt us in that,” Lum says with a chuckle.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that both band and label are willing to adapt themselves to the ever-shifting dynamic of the musical marketplace, stylistically and commercially. Since he formed LSD in 1991, Lum has demonstrated a consistent willingness to embrace change within the group and the innumerable contexts in which they work — style being the most apparent of these but the emergence of the digital music marketplace running close on its heels.

“That’s something I’ve thought a lot about recently, and I’m not sure what to conclude,” Lum says contemplatively. “Check back in five years and see what’s up,” he says with a wry chuckle, knowing full well that five years is an eternity in Internet time.

But Lum, who works for a multimedia company that builds Web pages for major-market radio stations, is fully aware of the Internet’s potential to expand his band’s fan base and the need for independent musicians to move fast in order to capture an audience in the overcrowded digital music arena. On that front, LSD is already moving at light speed.

“Our site, Lovespirals.com, is a great source of information, and we update the news frequently. You can buy our stuff, and you can check out audio from all of our albums – really nice, high-quality audio that you can hear, even on a 56k modem stream. It’s much better than the RealAudio that we, or most people, have had in the past. That’s one thing that I’ve always hated about Internet audio: You spend a year and a half to make this great album, put all this money and time and love into it, and you want to show people on the Internet. And it’s just these crappy samples.”

“It’s like bad AM radio,” adds Bee, who handles a lot of the day-to-day work on the Love Spirals Downwards Web site — answering fan mail, fulfilling orders from their “e-store” and administrating their forums.

“Yeah, it’s horrible,” Lum agrees. “But now, I can put something up and say, ‘Yeah. This is it. Check it out. In stereo even. It sounds great.'”

And for Lum, the rapid improvement of streaming audio quality has brightened the already blinding future of digital music distribution.

“I’m glad now, finally, that broadband is coming, so we can pump more bandwidth to people. But even now, the technology of encoding audio for the Internet has vastly improved over, say, two years ago. I think you’re going to see a lot this year with audio, like RadioSpy is a great example of how the Internet is finally ready for audio — or audio is ready for the Internet. So now’s the time.”

Perhaps due to the Internet’s ever-increasing reach, LSD’s Web presence enables them not only to stay in touch with their fans (“You don’t have to print up a dumb newsletter or anything like that. You just put it up on the Web. It’s right there; you can give them way more than you ever could in a newsletter,” Lum explains) but has also helped them cement a fan base around the globe.

This solid support has, in turn, given the band a way to convincingly make their case for stylistic freedom. Fan enthusiasm for the group’s work, past and present, made Projekt Records demonstrably more willing to trust Lum’s artistic inclinations.

“I guess, as we proved with Flux, even though we made an album that’s so different from anything else on the label, people didn’t complain. [Rosenthal] thought that people were going to say that Projekt [a label that typically markets itself to the goth and industrial community] or someone sold out, and none of that came out. So I guess he thought it was cool. He got a little paranoid at first, but mellowed out.”

Mellow seems to suit Lum just fine. While he has recently embraced the sometimes frenetic style of drum ‘n’ bass, electronica’s most energetic and quickly mutating subgenre, he strives to maintain the thoroughly gentle and vibrantly warm ambience that made Love Spirals Downwards darlings of the dark electronic underground.

“Most drum ‘n’ bass I don’t like, actually,” he explains. “A lot of it sounds like crazy machines gone nuts, and I’m into the more smooth atmospheric and jazzy drum ‘n’ bass. So yeah, it fits in perfectly with my sound. It’s rare that you see a whole genre of music that’s dedicated to atmosphere. And when I found that years back, it was like, ‘Yes! Right on! I can do this.'”

The transition from shoegazer goth-pop to drum ‘n’ bass unfolds more smoothly before the ear than the eye, a point that Temporal illustrates brilliantly. While technically a “greatest hits” album, Temporal takes on the not-so-obvious task of charting the band’s shift in sound. When heard one after another, LSD’s early, more ambient songs almost beg for the band’s current embrace of intelligent dance music.

“The only thing that’s different with my music is some of the sounds and maybe a little bit of the style,” he agrees. “But the vibe is still the same, meaning that it still comes from the same place. It’s still atmospheric music; it’s just done a little differently. Some [musicians], I think, consciously try to shock people and make a whole new kind of album. I’m not that radical. It’s still the same ‘pretty’ music.”

This interview originally appeared along with an audio stream of the conversation on RadioSpy.com. The RadioSpy site went offline years ago, but the text interview is archived on Flinn’s own site at Choler.com. This was the very first interview Anji appeared in.