Anji Bee is the featured artist on the second episode of Inside The Machine, the new audio show of Nicholas Young, founder of Original Machine. She and Nicholas sat down for an hour long interview on Skype, which actually went a bit longer as the two enjoyed their discussion of independent music, radio, podcasting, and fine arts so much. The show revolves around the back stories of 4 of Anji’s songs, “Love Me Leave Me,” “Hand In Hand,” “Love Will Turn Your Head Around,” and “Put Some Music On (Intensity of Sound Retro Funk Mix),” all of which are included in full on the show.
2017 UPDATE: This station is now defunct, but I archived it over on my InternetArchive account: AnjiBeeOnInsideTheMachine
This week I present my second artist feature with San Francisco band, Karmacoda. This time around we actually met up in Chillcast studio to chat live and in-person about their 4th album, Eternal, released last month. We had a really great time, which I think you’ll be able to hear in our conversation. Since we already got into the band’s history and past releases in my 2007 Chillcast Karmacoda artist feature, this time we focused solely on their new material. I close out the show with the premier of their brand new live acoustic recording of “Feel The Weight” — watch for the video on the next Chillcast Video!
Anji Bee is one half of the ‘smooth as honey’ two-person band known as Lovespirals (with musician/producer, Ryan Lum). The latest incarnation of Lovespirals has released four full-length albums and five EPs under a shortened version of the band’s previous name, Love Spirals Downwards (with vocalist, Suzanne Perry). While the music of Lovespirals is every bit as cool as the band’s name sounds, Anji Bee divides up her busy time with several other projects that include working on a solo album, as well as The Chillcast, a weekly, one-hour podcast that explores music from many angles, and the twice monthly Chillcast Video. Anji Bee’s Chillcast began in March of 2006 and has since logged in many hours of introductions to bands that are stylish and timely. Recently, Anji released a compilation CD called Chillcast: 5 Years of Chillin’ With Anji Bee. In listening to the collected fourteen-track CD, I was struck with the diversity of the music made available on the disc. Not only was I interested in why these songs filtered through into her top selections, but I also became interested in her take on the future of music.
Anji, what prompted you to put together Chillcuts over five years ago? After a decade of being signed to Projekt Records, Ryan and I wanted to try releasing music independently for a change. The whole reason our debut album, Windblown Kiss, was released on Projekt was simply that Ryan still owed an album on his contract (which is also why our band name is Lovespirals, rather than something unrelated to “Love Spirals Downwards”). But to get back to your question, I figured I had enough experience with online music distribution and promotion to handle a small record label, having done so much of that type of work for ‘Temporal‘ and ‘Windblown Kiss‘. I basically launched Chillcuts to release our 2nd album, ‘Free & Easy.’ Ryan’s experience in building the back-end of websites helped me to create expensive websites on the cheap, while my experience in the visual arts and background in social media and promotions helped to drive sales. Oddly enough, it seems this first release is our most popular, which may speak to how much effort we put into making Chillcuts succeed right out of the gate.
But some say they’re annoyed by what they see as attention-grabbing antics. Do pop stars’ constructions (be they costumes or stage sets) put pressure on less well-funded women musicians to be outrageous, to get more naked or cross more lines just to get noticed?
Anji Bee, Lovespirals: From my perspective, the most important thing is to develop a strong internet presence that includes quality audio, video, and photos. The more professional you come across, the more likely people are to take you seriously. I personally wouldn’t rely on gimmicks to get attention, but that seems to be working out for Lady Gaga, so who am I to say anything against it?
For the record, the question I was answering was: “What advice would you give to a woman musician just starting out?” You can read all my responses to the NPR Hey Ladies questionnaire.
This is a great series which includes many fantastic female artists who gave much more interesting answers than I did in my questionnaire, and I highly recommend you check it out!
The Cyber PR site posted a new interview with Anji Bee called New Media Pioneer: The Chillcast with Anji Bee. Heather Smith asked Anji about her shows The Chillcast and Chillin’ with Lovespirals, as well as the concept of Podsafe music, and more.
“The Sexiest Voice in Podcasting” Anji Bee of the Chillcast talks about the show and her double life as both podcaster and musician.
The Chillcast features a sexy and sophisticated mix of calming, chill podsafe music, hosted by Anji Bee. The station plays a blend of Electronica, Jazz, Soul, and New Age music.
This week I present a special one-hour interview feature on my band, Lovespirals. My partner, Ryan Lum, and I sit down to discuss our brand new 4th album, Future Past, and give an overview of the band’s decade-long history. We’ll be sharing every song on the album as we chat about our writing and recording process including our musical influences, album concepts, and the various stories surrounding our songs and albums. Really hope you enjoy the feature, and if you’d like to hear more interviews with us, follow the Lovespirals Mixcloud account!
The PodfinderUK blog posted a Mini-Interview with The Chillcast’s Anji Bee this week. Topics include the origin of both The Chillcast and Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcasts, my favorite podcasts and vidcasts, what I wanted to be when I was a child, the most “significant thing” to happen to me as a result of podcasting, and future plans for my shows. PodfinderUK is a great little “best of” style vidcast starring Josephine Laurence presenting an eclectic mix of vidcast and podcast clips from all over the podosphere.
This interview was conducted at the Denny’s in Seal Beach, CA at a time when Justin and Anji had named their band, Ravensong. By the way, we have a review of their promotional tape in this issue. In later Black Chronicles we would like to run an update on this exciting and breathtaking band!
BC: Could you tell our readers of any compilations or collection that the band has or will perform on, or works with any other bands?
Justin: There was someone from New York who did a fanzine called Graceless Passion and she was talking about a couple of comps that I was supposed to be on. I did the songs and got them ready.
Anji: That was months ago.
Justin: We haven’t heard from her since.
Dark Marc: They may have just moved?
Justin: I don’t think so because we sent two postcards. I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Datura are: Justin Johnsen, sequencing, guitar and vocals, and Anji Bee: vocals and guitar. Justin has been recording under the name Ravensong, having released two limited edition cassette singles and a full length cassette entitled Exorcism. Joining hím ís Anji, who appeared on one track from that cassette with vocals. Datura is composed of two independent voices: there is harmony and discord, ascent and descent, cleanliness and dirtiness, pushing and pulling… This is what they have to say about themselves.
Interview conducted by Christ Reider of Concept: Personality via mail.
Christ: What made you decide to work together as a new band, rather than continue on as Ravensong?
Justin: Hmm… The music we were beginning to write together took on a different character than the material I recorded as Ravensong. Even if Anji didn’t actually contribute musically to the newer songs, they were influenced by her in subtle ways.
Anji: We have been working on songs based on my guitar lines to some extent. I am not really a guitarist per se, but I like to work with it when I’m in that certain mood. I’m a bit reluctant to get too involved with the instrument as far as playing live, because it tends to distract from my vocals by making me nervous. We’ll see. I think that my influence, as far as guitars, especially, is to make the music more noisy, more layered, and less keyboard reliant.
Justin: Ravensong is definitely more electronic than Datura.
Anji: We still use the synth as the backbone of the compositions, certainly, and all our percussion so far is electronic, but it sounds a bit warmer now. Particularly with the addition of a bassist.
Justin: The actual bass gives us a sound that that keyboard could never achieve. More of a groove.
RAVENSONG: an interview with composer/musician Justin Johnsen.
BATPAL: How and when did Ravensong get started?
JUSTIN: Ravensong really got started in January of 1989. For the winter holidays I had been given a cassette player that could do overdubs. I began writing songs on it. So from the start, Ravensong has been more of a “studio” band than a live band. On those first songs I used a primitive Yamaha keyboard with some neat sounds and a few painfully simple drumbeats along with my main instrument –guitar– and my first attempts at singing. Actually, I still use the keyboard in some of my songs, although now they’re mostly done on the elaborate MIDI keyboard I have access to at school. The incarnations of “Butterfly Wisdom” and “The Jackal” that appear on Exorcism are reworkings of some of those early songs, and I intend to redo a few more of them. Ravensong eventually became dormant as I spent time with a few live bands, having tired of working entirely by myself. “The Calling of Bacchus” was written while I was in a band called The Watchmen (now defunct), and I have performed it live with two bands that I have been involved in.
Gradually these bands fell apart, and my sole musical outlet became my Ravensong music once again. By this time I had started attending Long Beach City College and was doing most of my writing on the sequencers and 8-track machines there. The sequencers allowed the music to become more elaborate, but l think it lost a little of the dark, raw minimalism of my original recordings. I’m working now (after Exorcism) on recapturing some of that feel by using more guitars and live keyboards. It’s important to retain the human element to the music. The name Ravensong, incidentally, didn’t suggest itself until sometime during 1992. I felt that I needed a “band” name to work under, and Ravensong was the only one that seemed appropriate; it was generic, but had a certain mystique to it. Raven is my guiding animal, and songs are what l create.
BATPAL: I was especially struck by the poetic virtue of the lyrics to songs like, “Solitude” and “Butterfly Wisdom”. Where do you find your inspiration?
JUSTIN: I try to make my music an expression of my self, so just about everything in my life influences it to some extent. Of the songs on Exorcism, I feel like “Solitude” is the best expression of me. It is written about a morning spent alone in nature, a morning full of realizations about myself and my life. A “spiritual” experience. My spiritual (metaphysical, supernatural, whatever word you care for) beliefs and experiences are sources of inspiration for much of my poetry, but so far that hasn’t really become a significant part of Ravensong. I’d like to incorporate a little more mysticism into my music. I have also been inspired to write poems/lyrics about negative feelings and experiences, and that is more of what you find on Exorcism. Somehow writing down these things and putting them into songs is a way of cleansing myself of them, turning destructive thoughts into creation. An exorcism. You mentioned “Butterfly Wisdom”; that was written about a friend who did a tremendous amount of LSD and began to hear voices in his head.
Musically I have numerous inspirations, though I honestly think that Daniel Ash’s older work has been the greatest. I listen to many different styles of music, and they all affect what I write to some degree. Some of the ones I feel have shown as influences in my songs are Tones on Tail, Coil, World of Skin, Dead Can Dance, Legendary Pink Dots… l used to play guitar in a jazz band in high school, and even that has affected my songwriting. I learned a couple of chords for “The Calling of Bacchus” in jazz band.
BATPAL: I know you and Anji are both fans of Twin Peaks (hence the song “Into the Black Lodge”) I’d love to hear any comments you might care to make about this particular television program…?
J: “Into the Black Lodge” was written by accident. It was during a time when I was first becoming interested in –might I say obsessed with?– Twin Peaks. As I watched the first seven or so episodes, I was collecting a tape of samples from the series. I had the beginnings of a song that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so for fun I took some of the scarier samples and put them to the music. I didn’t really intend to do anything with the composition, but as time went on I grew fonder of it and ended up including it on Exorcism. I am still a devout fan and hold to this day that Twin Peaks is the best series ever to have aired on American television. David Lynch is a genius. His work must be taken both literally and symbolically: on one level, Twin Peaks is a somewhat fantastic story of otherworldly entities meddling with the affairs of humans; but it can also be taken as a story of the horrors of physical/sexual child abuse and the neuroses that spring from such matters. Twin Peaks is a statement on humankind in general; Lynch brings to light all of the surreal and unexplainable things that happen in real life but are too often ignored out of apathy, fear, or misunderstanding.
BATPAL: In California (distinct in comparison to Kansas) there is a concentration of “Gothic” subculture and image among young people. Can you reflect on this? Any thoughts on the “scene” in general in comparison to, and in relation to, the artists, writers, musicians, etc.. who provide the substance behind it?
JUSTIN: Ah, the Gothic scene. I’m not much a part of that,though I have become more so lately. I think there are a number of weaknesses to that scene. The problem is that many of the people involved in it are immature or lack depth. It operates, on the large scale, the same way that society as a whole does. People are conforming to something just like the rest of society, it’s just that what they conform to as goths isn’t accepted by the rest of society. Too many gothic club-goers are concerned mostly with looking good when they dance, fitting the image that they feel is what makes them a goth, having emotionally traumatic soap operas, and catching up on the latest gossip. I’ve heards stories where good bands were playing at places like Helter Skelter and most of the club goths just stayed in the other room dancing and ignored them. There are certain bands everyone feeis obligated to like, and there is an element of closed-mindedness to anything that isn’t acceptably gothic. It seems like the ideals of the movement give way to the image. Actually, I don’t even know that the gothic scene has any ideals. I used to think when I was very young that it was comprised of people banding together because they felt out of place in Western society. As I grew. I realized that it was my own misconception.
But here I am, bitching about the scene, and not talking about the good aspects. Although there is some shallowness to be witnessed, there are a lot of really interesting people involved in the gothic subculture. I’ve met some of them, and because of California’s gothic culture, there will always be more to meet. Recently there has been an abundance of good shows by local bands., and that is another benefit of the size of the scene. I have to say that people who create the music, art,etc., are in a different category than the genral club-going/music-listening types. Many of the originators aren’t as concerned with being perceived as gothic, and so they bring more variety into the scene. Of course, there are a few bands (I will mention no names) who are no different than the shallowest conformist goths that I mentioned earlier, but one must expect that in any movement.
Justin JohnsenAnji Bee
BATPAL: What projects are you and Anji planning for the future? Additional works from Ravensong? Any more fanzine work?
JUSTIN: Anji and I plan to continue writing songs together. Whether this will turn out to be Ravensong or another project, I don’t know yet. I want to have either another Exorcism-length release or else a split 7-inch single with another band out by the end of the year. My plans could change tomorrow, though. I am studying recording in school, so this summer I may be doing some recording for a local band called Praise of Folly. I’ll be recording more Ravensongs during the remainder of my studio time. As far as fanzines go, I am assisting Anji with two at the moment. The first is a continuation of her last zine, Substitution, and the second zine is a project that Anji is doing with a friend. It will be called Descent, and will focus more on dark (gothic etc.) music. Both should be high-quality publications.
Bathory Palace thanks Justin Johnsen for his time and effort.
RAVENSONG: EXORCISM The first demo for this musical project from Long Beach, CA, Exorcism is an inspired collection of ethereal and experimental tracks. Keyboard and guitar, layered over a moving drumline, are given articulation through poetic lyrics touching on dark themes such as isolation and insanity. Ravensong features two members. Justin Johnsen and Anji Bee; together, they’ve created a remarkable beginning with this album. I hope there will be more from Ravensong in the future.
