During the Ardor era, Love Spirals Downwards became deeply woven into the creative fabric of Projekt Records — not simply as a signed act, but as active collaborators in the small, trust-driven ecosystem that Sam Rosenthal had spent years assembling. That integration was organic, and it began almost before the ink on their deal had dried.
By the early 1990s, Projekt had developed a recognizable aesthetic and a growing roster of geographically scattered artists — among them Lycia, Soul Whirling Somewhere, Eden, Thanatos, and Black Tape for a Blue Girl. Ryan Lum took an early interest in that extended family. In a 1992 interview with the French fanzine, Noising Therapy, he sketched the network from a distance:
“Certainly Sam Rosenthal and I are good friends now. Recently I was able to spend some time with Mike from Lycia… I also had several phone conversations with Sean from Eden, Pat from Thanatos, Michael from Soul Whirling Somewhere, and Scott and Melissa from lovesliescrushing. They are all very nice, but I would really like to grab a drink one day with Sean and Pat.”
The relationships were still largely conducted by phone and letter — but the kinship was already real.
The Black Tape Conversations
Rosenthal himself was not just a label founder but a working musician, and Love Spirals Downwards’ proximity to Projekt inevitably meant proximity to his own project, Black Tape for a Blue Girl. In 1993, Lum contributed atmospheric guitar work to the song “Overwhelmed, Beneath Me” on This Lush Garden Within, Black Tape’s fourth album, deepening the creative exchange between the two acts.
The collaboration ran in both directions: moved by the music, Lum and Perry began exploring a cover of Black Tape’s “Tear Love From My Mind.” Stripped of its original synth-driven melancholy and rebuilt around a delicate acoustic arrangement and Perry’s emotive vocals, the cover found its way onto Ardor — a quiet signal of how openly ideas traveled within the Projekt constellation.
That single cover, however, set something larger in motion. In a 1993 letter to potential contributors, Rosenthal described the spark:
“Was talking with Ryan (of Love Spirals Downwards). He said they are toying with a cover version of a Black Tape for a Blue Girl song. We began shooting ideas back and forth, and one of us hit upon the idea of doing a ‘cover CD’ with other bands performing my songs. Since it sounds like an ego-centric concept, I like to say it was RYAN’S IDEA!”
Of These Reminders: Projekt’s Fiftieth Release
That idea became Of These Reminders: A Tribute to Black Tape for a Blue Girl — Projekt’s 50th release, issued in 1994 as a luxurious two-disc boxed set. The package was a deliberate artifact: two jewel case CDs housed inside a box, featuring evocative photography by Susan Jennings –Rosenthal’s partner and longtime Projekt photographer– and graphic design by Rosenthal himself. Included were four postcards with detailed information about the release, plus a Black Tape for a Blue Girl sticker — a presentation that signaled the compilation was meant to be held and experienced, not simply filed away. Both individual CDs were also available separately, and a cassette edition brought the compilation to a still-wider audience.
Alternative Press recognized the ambition immediately: “This set is a triumph that goes beyond the mere scope of words. It should stand out as one of the year’s best.” All Music Guide matched that enthusiasm, describing it as “Great, sympathetic packaging… Absolutely 100% beautiful, ghostly, spine-tingling, float-away music for the inner self you weren’t previously in touch with.”
The roster reflected Projekt’s full mid-’90s constellation: alongside Love Spirals Downwards, contributors included lovesliescrushing, Lycia, Soul Whirling Somewhere, Stoa, Human Drama, Attrition, and Thanatos — the project of Pat Ogle and Sam Rosenthal himself. That Thanatos appeared on the album underscored the intimacy of the undertaking: Projekt’s promotional director and its founder performing tribute to their own creative home.
Love Spirals Downwards contributed two tracks exclusive to the compilation, “Through Sky Blue Rooms” and “Could I Stay the Honest One?” — the latter of which Lum repurposed for the mysterious backwards-forwards vocals of “Sidhe” on Love Spirals Downwards’ 1994 album, Ardor.
In a 1994 interview recorded for an official Projekt promotional cassette — released to coincide with both Ardor and Of These Reminders and later excerpted in Fond AffexxionsIssue 5 (Winter Thaw 1995) — Jon Gonzales drew out the duo’s reflections on the project in unusually candid detail:
Lum: “We did a total of three Black Tape covers; two for the Of These Reminders compilation and one for our album.”
Perry: “And the reason we ended up doing three covers is because it was so easy for us! We labor over our songs so much, so to have everything already made — no lyrics to write, no vocal parts to invent, and no music to compose, except an interpretation — it was like [snaps fingers] cake!”
Lum: “Yeah, and it was fun, too, actually.”
Perry: Yeah, it was fun. It was all the fun parts of making music.
The contrast Perry described — the grinding, open-ended labor of original composition against the relative freedom of interpretation — illuminated something essential about their creative process. Writing for Ardor had meant months of solitary studio work, guitars looped in rooms while Perry was hundreds of miles north finishing her thesis. The Black Tape covers required none of that negotiation. The architecture was already standing; they only had to move through it.
In the band’s 1994 newsletter, Lum described the two projects as running concurrently — and almost in competition for the duo’s attention:
“We have been busy finishing our upcoming, not-yet-titled second CD. After about a year and a half, it’s finally finished! As it currently stands, Projekt Records should be releasing it sometime in September. We’ve also completed two new tracks for the upcoming Projekt release Of These Reminders, a collection of various artists’ interpretations of Black Tape For A Blue Girl songs. Artists contributing to this double-CD compilation include labelmates lovesliescrushing, Lycia, Soul Whirling Somewhere, and Sunwheel, as well as others such as Stoa, Human Drama, and Attrition. This should be out sometime in August.”
The calm, list-like tone belied the scale of what they had accomplished: two full creative projects — one original, one collaborative — completed in the same period, while the duo lived in different cities.
Excelsis ~ A Dark Noël: The Christmas Album Nobody Expected
The origins of Excelsis ~ A Dark Noël had nothing to do with Sam Rosenthal’s musical instincts. In a December 2019 post on Projekt’s website, the label’s founder was characteristically honest about where the idea came from:
“Primarily Patrick Ogle… deserves 97% of the credit for Projekt Records’ holiday series.”
Raised in an atheist and marginally Jewish household, Rosenthal had no natural gravitational pull toward holiday music. Pat Ogle — Projekt’s promotions director, living and working so closely to Rosenthal during the Pasadena years that his desk sat directly outside Rosenthal’s office door — recognized both the gap and the audience. An alternative Christmas album, approached with the same emotional seriousness Projekt brought to everything else, was not a novelty: it was an underserved need.
In spring 1995, Projekt began approaching artists for contributions to the holiday compilation planned for that winter. Lum and Perry were already in motion — between finishing the East Coast acoustic tour and beginning sessions for what would eventually become Ever — when they quietly completed their contribution. The first public mention came in the band’s July 30, 1995 newsletter, tucked between tour dates and a note about press coverage in B-Side magazine:
“We have just finished a track that will be on the upcoming Christmas/Winter Holidays CD from Projekt.”
No title, no fanfare — just the matter-of-fact announcement of something completed and set in motion.
By November, the track had a name and a context. In his November 5, 1995 update — written in the exhale after the East Coast tour, the Southern California shows, and the first live performances of their careers — Lum folded the release into a broader inventory of a remarkably full year:
“We released a new track, a cover of ‘Welcome Christmas from Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, on the new Projekt holiday CD called Excelsis.”
He mentioned it in the same breath as the upcoming Troubadour show and the still-untitled album taking shape in the studio. At the time, it read as a footnote.
Choosing Dr. Seuss
The choice of “Welcome Christmas” was not an obvious one — and that was precisely the point. Written by composer Albert Hague with lyrics by Dr. Seuss for the 1966 television special How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the song is built almost entirely from invented words. The Whos of Whoville don’t sing in English: they sing in glossolalia.
“Flah who floraze / Sah who doraze / Welcome Christmas / Bring your light”
The syllables are phonetic constructions designed to sound like language without being language — meaning carried entirely by melody, rhythm, and communal breath. For Suzanne Perry, whose vocal approach had long embraced angelic, wordless textures as atmospheric instruments — the “la di la di la da das” woven through Ardor‘s more introspective passages — the fit was almost uncanny. She had spent years developing a voice that operated on the level of sensation rather than semantics. Dr. Seuss, writing for animated television in 1957, had intuited the same aesthetic.
The lyrics also move through something more than mere nonsense. The Seussian syllables dissolve into plain English at key moments — “Welcome Christmas while we stand / Heart to heart and hand in hand” — before retreating again into invented sound. That oscillation between the legible and the incantatory, between communal declaration and pure phonetic texture, mirrors precisely the way Perry navigated between identifiable lyric and dissolved atmosphere throughout the Ardor sessions. In choosing “Welcome Christmas,” Lum and Perry hadn’t departed from their artistic identity — they had found a song that had been waiting, for nearly three decades, to confirm it.
In their hands, the transformation was complete. Lum’s jangly dream pop guitars, mellow drum machine pulse carried Perry’s soaring, serene vocals across a shimmering landscape that felt continuous with their Ardor palette — warmer than melancholy, more interior than celebration— while contrasting with the more ambient electro-acoustic direction they would explore on Ever.
The Album and Its Legacy
Excelsis ~ A Dark Noël was released in time for the 1995 holiday season and has barely left the calendar since. The original pressing —a jewel case CD with an 8-page booklet featuring evocative sepia toned photography by Susan Jennings and “Alex,” with design by Sam Rosenthal —sold over 15,000 copies. A 2000 Opus review captured the album’s quiet power with unusual precision:
“I can honestly say that Excelsis: A Dark Noël is the best Christmas album I’ve heard in a long time. Don’t let the title fool you; this isn’t dark and depressing, and it’s not meant for lonely Christmas nights. With the Projekt label, the music is always beautiful. Besides just having Christian carols, the album also features some secular ones, such as Love Spirals Downwards’ beautiful rendition of ‘Welcome Christmas.’ I find it funny that a label associated with ‘gothic’ and ‘dark’ music would put out one of the finest Christmas albums I know of. Most people associate goths with doom and gloom, but this album is far from it. Excelsis is an honest, sincere, and moving tribute to one of the most beautiful seasons of the year; it contains far more depth and power than any mass-produced, pop Christmas album.”
The review named something that the compilation’s detractors, in their genre assumptions, often missed: that Projekt’s aesthetic was never about bleakness for its own sake. It was about emotional precision — and there was nothing imprecise about what Lum and Perry had made.
The nationally syndicated Echoes radio program described the album as “among the most distinctive and haunting seasonal albums ever,” and host John Diliberto has featured “Welcome Christmas” in nearly every holiday broadcast for over a decade. In 2023, Goldmine noted that “1995’s ‘Excelsis ~ A Dark Noël’ not only became a key festive disc, but demanded several sequels too.”
The resonance was still audible decades later. On a 2023 episode of the Noisextra podcast, hosts Mike and Tara Connolly discussed the track with genuine affection:
Mike: “Definitely my favorite song, and one of my favorite Projekt bands, Love Spirals Downwards. ‘Welcome Christmas.’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas song. I love how slowed down this gets, and I love her voice doing it. To me, I only think of this song as this version. I don’t even think of it as from ‘The Grinch.”’
Tara: “Yeah, it’s a great one. This is right in that perfect pocket of sweetness and darkness. It’s dreamy, it’s drowsy, and the clear-as-a-bell female voice—I find this just uber satisfying to listen to.”
Mike: “Yeah, I love Love Spirals Downwards. I think all their Projekt records are fantastic! But yeah, this is such a great brightly dark track. Absolutely love this one.”
The phrase Tara Connolly reached for — “a perfect pocket of sweetness and darkness” — is as apt a description of LSD’s artistic sensibility as any single critic has managed. It also explains why “Welcome Christmas” has outlasted the context that produced it. It isn’t a seasonal obligation. It’s a song that happens to be set at Christmas — and one that, almost by accident, reveals exactly who Lum and Perry were at the height of their collaborative powers.
In 2021, Rosenthal reached out to Lum directly to locate the original mix for a full remastered reissue. The album was reissued on CD and digitally, with limited vinyl pressings in multiple color variants (300 copies per variant). Twenty-six years after its initial release, Pat Ogle’s inspired act of advocacy — and Lum and Perry’s three minutes and forty-one seconds of invented language and reverb — had produced one of the most durable entries in Projekt’s catalog.
What Rosenthal and Ogle had built internally — an audience primed for beauty over commerce — Hyperium had been assembling simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic.
Heavenly Voices and the Hyperium Reach
While Projekt provided a home for Love Spirals Downwards in the U.S., their music also found an audience overseas thanks to a partnership between Projekt and the German label Hyperium Records. Beginning in the early 1990s, Hyperium co-released key Projekt albums for the European market, including their debut, Idylls (1992), and sophomore album, Ardor (1994). This collaboration led to Love Spirals Downwards becoming a recurring presence on Hyperium’s influential compilation series.
The inaugural Heavenly Voices compilation was a two-CD set released in 1993, available both as a limited edition boxed set with three prints and as separate single-disc editions (Part 1 and Part 2). Compiled by Oli Rösch, the international roster including Projekt and Projekt-adjascent acts —The Moon Seven Times, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Eleven Shadows, and Eventide— alongside Hyperium’s European artists: Chandeen, Stoa, Love Is Colder Than Death, Attrition, Ordo Equitum Solis, Love Is Colder Than Death, In the Nursery, and Sleeping Dogs Wake. Love Spirals Downwards contributed an extended mix of “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, marking their debut in the series.
The following year, Hyperium’s French distribution partner, Semantic, released a companion volume — Heavenly Voices (1994) — featuring “And the Wood Comes Into Leaf” from Idylls, alongside Love Is Colder Than Death, Stoa, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, and Chandeen. By 1995, Love Spirals Downwards had become a staple of the series. Heavenly Voices III opened with their song “Write in Water” — a track, according to the band newsletter, that had been submitted to Hyperium before Ardor was even released, suggesting how naturally material moved within this transatlantic network. The 18-track collection placed them alongside Bel Canto, Chandeen, Faith and the Muse, Miranda Sex Garden, This Ascension, and Faith and Disease, mapping the full breadth of the international ethereal scene at its mid-decade peak.
Hyperium further amplified that visibility through two Projekt-themed samplers in 1995: Beneath the Icy Floe — A Projekt Sampler, which opened with Ardor‘s “Avicenna” alongside Lycia, lovesliescrushing, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Soul Whirling Somewhere, and Thanatos — while also including “This Endris Night” from Idylls —offering European listeners a fuller view of the band’s range across both albums. Zauber of Music Vol. II, a co-release between Hyperium and EMI Electrola, extended the reach further still, placing Love Spirals Downwards alongside Stoa, Love Is Colder Than Death, Chandeen, Sleeping Dogs Wake, Eden, Attrition, Lycia, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, and Eleven Shadows, and pushing the reach well beyond the underground network into broader European distribution.
By the time Ardor reached European listeners, Love Spirals Downwards were already a familiar name in those catalogs — not newcomers to be introduced, but established voices in an international conversation.
The Legacy of Compilations: Building a Genre
The 1990s was the golden age of the curated sampler, and for Love Spirals Downwards, these weren’t just tracks on a disc—they were identity markers that did the slow, cumulative work of situating the band within something larger than themselves.
By appearing alongside acts like Bel Canto (Norway), Die Form (France), Miranda Sex Garden (UK), and Ordo Equitum Solis (Italy), Love Spirals Downwards was no longer simply a “goth-adjacent” band from Pasadena They were part of a sophisticated, international avant-garde — artists who shared not a nationality or a label but a sensibility: introspective, atmospheric, and stubbornly committed to emotional over commercial logic.
These compilations also did the hard work of genre-naming. Fans didn’t have to wonder what to call this music; the series titles gave them a vocabulary — Heavenly Voices, Beneath the Icy Floe — that created a shared mental shelf in record stores and listener imaginations worldwide. The Heavenly Voices series became so synonymous with female-fronted ethereal, darkwave, neoclassical, and dream-pop music that it generated its own retroactive classification: a genre named, in effect, by the record that curated it.
And through Hyperium’s distribution infrastructure, the “Projekt sound” — introspective, ethereal, and emotionally raw — became a genuinely global commodity. It proved that the California underground could be as ghostly and atmospheric as anything emerging from the German or British scenes, and that the distance between Pasadena and the European underground was, in the end, no distance at all..
Outro: Toward the Shimmering Horizon
As 1995 drew to a close, Love Spirals Downwards sat at the center of a vast, interconnected web of artists, labels, and international fans. They had navigated the creative ease of the Black Tape covers, left a permanent mark on the holiday canon with “Welcome Christmas,” and accumulated a remarkable footprint across European compilations — all while completing their first live performances and laying the groundwork for a new album.
What no one could have predicted was the direction that new album would take — or where its seeds had been planted. A year of acoustic performance had done something unexpected: it had stripped the music to its bones and revealed a new kind of possibility in the space left behind. The same impulse that reduced the Ardor sound to a single voice and a single guitar would, paradoxically, point the way toward something far more expansive.
The stage had proved the songs could survive without their studio armor. And the tension between that discovery — acoustic nakedness, a lone voice in a room — and the pull of something more electronic, more spacious, and more abstract would define what came next.
Love Spirals Downwards were not abandoning their sound. They were about to find out how far it could travel in two directions at once.
The era of Ardor was complete. The era of Ever was about to begin.