Matt Rowe of MusicTap recently interviewed Anji Bee for a feature on the newly revamped music site. Entitled, Quality Time With Anji Bee of Lovespirals and Chillcast, the piece goes into some depth about Anji’s thoughts on the current state of music while looking into the origins of her Chillcuts Digital label, the creation of her new The Chillcast with Anji Bee: 5 Years of Chillin’ compilation, and how she selects music for her weekly podcast, The Chillcast with Anji Bee. Matt has been a long time supporter of Anji’s band, Lovespirals. He featured the duo in 2006 with his MusicTap piece, Honey and Cool Jazz ‘n’ Rock: An Interview with Ryan Lum and Anji Bee of Lovespirals.
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.
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