Listen to an 8 min medley of Long Way From Home (128 mp3)
Listen to an 8 min medley of Long Way From Home (128 mp3)
We’ve got another remix competition launching on Peace Love Productions’ site, so it’s time to update our band bio once again! Always fun to spin our life story to fit a particular project… not! If only these things wrote themselves.
Lovespirals return to Peace Love Productions for their 2nd remix competition with “This Truth” from their upcoming 3rd album, Long Way From Home. A mellow midtempo Rhodes-driven number with warm, soulful vocals, bluesy guitar licks, and an upbeat vibe, this 96 bpm track is ripe for remixing in any number of genres.
Indeed, genre-bending is Lovespirals forte. The duo of musician, Ryan Lum, and vocalist, Anji Bee, began collaborating during the height of the atmospheric jazz-step drum ‘n’ bass scene of the late 90’s, creating white label dubplates. Surprisingly, their debut full length CD, Windblown Kiss (Projekt 2002), was a collection of dream pop and alt folk with jazzy overtones. Their 2005 follow up, Free & Easy (on the band’s own label, Chillcuts) was more electronica oriented, featuring jazzy downtempo and deep house tracks alongside jazz and blues influenced pop. Long Way From Home (Chillcuts Oct. 2007), finds Lovespirals adding classic Americana to their colorful sound palette to create some of their most beautiful and melancholic music to date.
Melancholic beauty is Ryan’s musical trademark. His prior work as Love Spirals Downwards explored the same ethereal depths as the Cocteau Twins and Slowdive, who appear alongside LSD on the iTunes Essentials: Shoegaze & Beyond playlist. The top selling act of preeminent darkwave label, Projekt, Love Spirals Downwards’ 1992 debut, Idylls, and 1994 followup, Ardor – which have sold aprox. 30,000 combined to date – are being reissued in an expanded and remastered digipac format in late 2007.
Lending a grounding energy to the music is the sensual voice of Anji, who’s known as “the sexiest voice in podcasting.” Anji began her podcasting career in mid 2005 by creating Chillin’ with Lovespirals to promote the band’s music and stay in touch with their fans. She caught the attention of PodShow founder, Adam Curry, who is a staunch supporter of Lovespirals on his infamous Daily Source Code. Her weekly music show, The Chillcast with Anji Bee draws in several thousand loyal listeners and ShowGirls – featuring Miss Bee – just won a People’s Choice Podcast Award.
Lovespirals’ music has been featured on MTV, VH1, E!TV, ABC, WB Network, and many other television and cable channels internationally. Their albums are available digitally via iTunes, Rhapsody, and Emusic as well as in CD format through Amazon, CDBaby, and other online retailers.
Our podcast has hit the big 4-0! Update on the new Lovespirals album progress, our New Media Expo 2007 plans – including a ShowGirls meet ‘n’ greet and Lovespirals unplugged performance, review of the B.B. King show at Hollywood Bowl, John Mayer boosted our stats, Chillcast #80 RSS problem and stat anomaly, band email, Love Spirals Downwards reissue update, “Motherless Child” Remix EP news — including a clip from the brand new Chris Caulder (of Beauty’s Confusion) remix!
More Lovespirals news than you can shake a stick at including our new mobile recording setup including a MacBook Pro, M-Audio Fast Track Pro, MCA SP1 mic and Sennheiser HD 280 Headphones, Ryan loving Facebook but hating MySpace, designing the Long Way From Home digipac artwork, ShowGirls wins PodcastAwards, Lovespirals’ New Media Expo 2007 plans, our inclusion on the Asian Variations and Projekt 200 compilation CDs, forming a street team, Pat Ogle email, a live song clip AND an extra special contest for your chance to win a copy of the Projekt 200 limited edition 3 CD boxed set with an brand new Lovespirals track! The show closes with a clip of us playing an unreleased song live.
“Empty Universe” from Lovespirals’ upcoming CD, Long Way From Home and “Write in Water” from the upcoming remastered reissue of Love Spirals Downwards‘ Ardor are included on the boxed set compilation, Projekt 200. A celebration of the 200th release for Projekt, the 3 era 3 CD set includes 32 songs from the label’s 24 year history. This limited edition collection will be available in stores Sept 25th, but you can buy it at projekt.com now.
MoShang just released a full length remix compilation entitled, Asian Variations, as a free Creative Commons download via asianvariations.com. The 14 track collection includes his remix of Lovespirals’ new single, “Motherless Child,” from their upcoming October 2007 album. You can also stream or download his remix from myspace.com/anjibee or myspace.com/lovespirals, and podcasters can add it to their playlists via Lovespirals’ Podsafe Music Network Page. Plans are underway to release a digital only EP of “Motherless Child” remixes, so watch for news at lovespirals.com!
[audio:http://chillcuts.com/audio/motherless_child_moshang_mix.mp3]
Listen to “Motherless Child (MoShang’s No Place Like Home Mix)”
I don’t always do things in the right order. I have pages on facebook, ziki, and linkeIn to name a few. But just today, I created my personal myspace page. I’m not sure exactly what i’m going to do with it as I have myspace pages for Lovespirals and Love Spirals Downwards. But it’s a start and at least I’m the first and only Ryan Lum who has my myspace address www.myspace.com/ryanlum. Anyways, feel free to drop by and add me as a friend. I currently have zero after I deleted the default Tom dude.
There’s a new song streaming in our Lovespirals MySpace player. It’s the brand spanking new Hungry Lucy remix of our “Motherless Child.” 4 bands were invited to remix our rendition of this classic anonymous blues song, including Hungry Lucy, Karmacoda, MoShang, and Beauty’s Confusion. We hope to release a digital single on iTunes with all 4 remixes, plus a special Lovespirals remix, sometime over the next 2 months. Stay tuned to lovespirals.com for more details! Photo by Gregory Aune.
Lots of Lovespirals news including mastering Long Way From Home with Robert Rich, photo sessions results, voting for The Chillcast with Anji Bee on PodcastAwards July 28th – Aug 11th, launch of the Anji Bee Music Store, New Media Expo 2007, Ryan’s birthday on July 31st, an LA Times story about the SoundExchange controversy, fan emails, social media sites Pownce, Ziki, Ning, Facebook, MySpace, and more – plus we share the a clip of the Karmacoda Mix of “Motherless Child”. Happy Birthday to Sean Bowley!
Anji and I spent this past weekend mastering our upcoming album, Long Way From Home, with Robert Rich in his studio in Mountain View, California. In addition to all the great locally grown food and wine we were treated to and the fun time we had hanging with Robert, the mastering came out really well. I mean really well. I can’t believe how nice it all sounds. This is quite exciting as mastering for me in the past has been primarily about trying to deal with audio deficiencies that were in my original mixes. I guess I’ve gotten better over the years, as there were very few such issues. Instead, Robert was able to focus on perfecting the sound, which he did an amazing job of. Thank you Robert (if you happen to read this)!
Sorry for the month long lapse, but Lovespirals have been crazy busy preparing to release the new album! Ryan and Anji talk about that album progress, as well as our upcoming mastering session with Robert Rich, photo sessions, and cover art design, plus the Lovespirals CoverCast on Student Loan Radio, Anji’s recent work with Moosefrog, Pownce VS Twitter, the SoundExchange controversy, Creative Commons, The Chillcast with Anji Bee on PodcastAwards, starting up a band email list, and more — plus we share the Hungry Lucy Mix of “Motherless Child” in it’s entirety!
Ryan and I guest hosted Christopher Penn’s Student Loan Radio CoverCast #2 this weekend, and no — we didn’t talk about financial aid! The band were given the opportunity to share recordings of songs written by John Denver, America, and Pink Floyd, due to Financial Aid Podcast‘s recent acquisition of an ASCAP/BMI podcasting license. Woo hoo! Check it out, and if you enjoy it, please go comment on Chris’s blog to let him know![audio:http://cache.libsyn.com/financialaidpodcast/20070708.mp3]