Ryan is currently the Personality of the
Week on the South African based Underground Press website.
They’ve included some nice photos of him alongside his rather brief
interview. He’s a man of few words…

Crap! I just realized I missed Robin’s show at Club Violaine last night!!! I was working out in Santa Monica and went to dinner afterwards with some friends and it totally slipped my mind. Somehow I was thinking it was tonight. What a bummer… I really enjoyed his show at The Knitting Factory a few months back. I wonder how it went last night with the whole improv set thing?

If you’ve ever wondered what Anji did musically before joining forces with
Ryan, then check out her solo page at: soundclick/anjibee. You can also listen to an interview by DJ Carolee during
Lovespirals 2002 tour on Anji’s page. While you’re there, be sure to see both soundclick/lovespirals and soundclick/lovespiralsdownwards for some exclusive content!

John from the Suburban Lawn’s (anyone remember them?) lives down the street and was having a little garage sale last weekend, so I brought Ryan along for the friend’s only presale. Turns out he picked up Su Tissue’s old Bassman amp head from John. The thing sounds pretty amazing. Ryan geeked out and did a ton of research on it, narrowing down the date and everything. I guess he should really be posting about this, not me. I was just kinda tickled by the fact that this thing was formerly being used by a punk rock princess!

Just finished uploading a fairly complete interview archive to the LSD site this weekend. It’s composed of 18 pdf files of scanned magazine articles dated between 1992 and 1999, some of which are quite interesting. The first Fond Affexxions one is particularly cool, as it contains a number of unique photographs that we don’t even have copies of.

If anyone out there has a magazine feature that’s not included in the archive, I’d love to get a jpg file of it for our collection! I’m especially looking for the Option one that’s a special issue on music and LSD, the drug. Ryan’s copy has gone missing…

Anyway, hopefully folks will get a kick out of reading the history of the band in the band’s own words, through all of these great magazine articles. Kind of makes me nostalgic for the days before the internet, ya know? Since 1999, nearly everything we do is for websites! There’s something about thumbing through paper magazines that’s kind of cool — even if it wastes trees, creates refuse, and all of that…

Check out the archive over at lovespiralsdownwards.com in the “interviews” section!

Now is the official launch of the band’s Cafe Press Store which is just filled to the brim with cool merchandise for both Lovespirals and Love Spirals Downwards, including t-shirts, stickers, and buttons. Everything is priced very, very low for your shopping enjoyment, so get it while it’s hot at cafepress.com/lovespirals!

Just thought I’d send a holiday greeting out to everyone on this sunny So Ca Christmas day. Hope everyone is having a good time wherever they may be!

I always wanted to get one, but there was always something more important that I seemed to need. Well thank god for Christmas to fix little situations like that. It’s actually our band Ipod and it’s one with a 40 gig drive. A Mini may have been better for its portability but its 4 gig drive limits it a little. Particularly since I’m taking advantage of having the big drive in our Ipod. This week I’ve changed the way i view digital music listening. No more crappy 128 mp3’s which I’ve always hated listening to. Now I’m encoding my music library as 320 aac’s, which sound way better, and for music that I absolutely love I’m using the Apple Lossless Encoder, which doesn’t alter the sound of the original music but just cuts the file size in half. Now listening to music on a computer or the Ipod is actually enjoyable.

Just remembered that there is a free download of Ryan’s 1994 cover of a Dr. Seuss holiday classic from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas available on the Projekt Records website. Interpreted in a very dream pop, shoegazery way, the tune cleverly plays upon the vocal style of Suzanne, who often sang in nonsense words for Love Spirals Downwards (prior band incarnation, in case you didn’t know). Perfect choice for the band! So check it out — “Welcome Christmas”

Just got Katamari Damacy last night – omg! It was supposed to be a Christmas present from Ryan, but I guessed what it was anyway so he just let me have it. We played it for hours and I was dreaming about it all night long. That game is so crazy, Peter Max, Yellow Submarine, and pure Japanese fun all rolled up (pun intended) into one big fun nonsensical package. I want to go play it again right now.

The past few days there’s been electric work being done around here and it’s been a total bummer! I realize now how reliant I am on electricity for everything I do. First of all, having to power down my computer sucks. But I also can’t listen to music on the stereo, play a game on PlayStation2, do laundry, cook food, or even fricken SEE in most of the rooms. Sigh.

Of course, I’ve found out that a lot of the wiring was in pretty bad shape, so it’s all for the best that it’s getting fixed… I just can’t wait for it all to be done so that I can go back to my usual electronified lifestyle!

For now, however, I have to switch off all my computer gear again – boo hoo.

Sheesh! I can’t believe tomorrow is fricken December already! The year is over, more or less. The whirlwind of American Holidays is upon us, and we didn’t get our album out. We’ve been fiddling with this second one way more than the first one. Some of the songs have been recorded 2 or 3 times. Consequently, I think it’s way, way better than the first one. Still, I wish we had gotten it out in time for Christmas. Oh well! Early next year, perhaps?