There’s been a lot happening with Love Spirals Downwards this year. There’s a nice article on us in the July/August issue of B-Side magazine, as well as a smaller article in the latest issue of Fond Affexxions. And, we are currently recording and mixing new material, hopefully releasing a new full length next Spring. Also, we have just finished a track that will be on the upcoming Christmas/Winter Holidays CD from Projekt.
And, we have some upcoming acoustic shows (finally we’ve been persuaded to leave the safety of our studio). For the East Coast, we are confirmed for the following:
• Boston: Thursday, August 31 at TT The Bear, 10 Brookline Street, Central Sq., (617)-492-BEAR
• Philadelphia: Friday, September 1 at Asylum, 1517 N. Delaware Ave, (215) 427-1087
• New York: Saturday, September 2 at Batcave, 251 W. 30’th between 7’th and 8’th. (212)-695-2747
For the West Coast, we recently played a fun show in Seattle with Faith & Disease and Trance to the Sun. In California, we are tentatively set to play in Los Angeles on September 21, and San Diego in late August. Be sure to call the Projekt info/tour line at (818) 395-7698 for the latest info on these and the other shows.
While the beautiful sounds of California’s Projekt Records have almost become a genre of their own, it was back in 1992 that I first discovered the label, through a compilation entitled From Across This Gray Land 3. The album’s opener was a lush combination of dreamy, swirling guitar and blissful vocals, and I was instantly hooked. That song was “Mediterranea” by Love Spirals Downwards.
The duo of Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry have since released two successful albums on Projekt, 1992’s Idylls and, most recently, Ardor. LSD is perhaps one of the few bands linked to the ’80s 4AD sound that are actually worth discovering. Knowing how painfully quiet and difficult some ether-celebs are to interview (Mazzy Star, Cranes) I worried a bit about these two. A quick call proved my fears unfounded; they were both delightful and eager to discuss their band. In fact, Suzanne put me at ease instantly with the simple phrase: “Wow, a female interviewer, how nice.” She then went on to recount her memories of beach harassment. But that’s another story.
I began my probe with the most obvious queries about their background, musical and romantic.
“We grew up in the same area of California,” explained Suzanne. “But we didn’t know each other until we started dating. We were both doing music, but I never thought I would make a career out of singing. We decided to try doing a couple of songs together, so we went into the studio and recorded a three-song demo.”
The May 23rd issue of this Texas newspaper includes a review of Love Spirals Downwards second album:
“Love Spirals Band delivers intensity” By C. J. Hart
The song starts with a cascade of acoustic guitar work as a set of string instruments pulsates in the background. A high, almost ethereal vocal line follows {in} a woman’s plaintive words.
A chorus of electric guitar jumps into the music as it builds up to a frighteningly intense climax.
You say you’ve heard this before? Possibly, but only if you’ve heard Love Spirals Downwards before.
Ardor, which is the follow-up to Love Spirals Downward’s debut, Idylls, is an album full of songs that are at once disturbing and beautiful.
Love Spirals Downwards create haunting tapestries of beautifully layered ethereal guitars and stirring, golden female vocals which seem sometimes like a shaft of sunlight making its way through the smoky gloom. Their debut album, Idylls, invited listeners into their shimmering world. With Ardor, their second release for Projekt, Love Spirals Downwards seem to have become more comfortable with their listeners and embrace them with their bare souls. In February, I spoke with the two members of Love Spirals Downwards, Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry, about the change between albums, the band, and their impending tour.
Idylls seems a lot darker than Ardor.
Ryan: That’s interesting, because some people who we showed Ardor to before it came out said, ‘It’s not that different,’ and other people said, ‘You guys have really changed a lot.’
Your fundamental style has stayed the same; I think it’s just your approach.
Suzanne: Yeah, it’s definitely a little lighter – not much lighter, though. You couldn’t describe it as light, but when you compare it to Idylls, its kind like one step about suicidal, you know… (Laughs)
DAVYD: Were you together as a band previous to being in the area?
SUZANNE: I guess in ’91 we started? Well, I’ve always been singing and he’s been doing music for a really long time. We actually were going out before we started doing music together. I had never done music with anyone before. We did a few songs together then trashed those 2 or 3 songs because we didn’t think they were too good, did a few more and put them on a demo tape and sent them off. At that time we were calling ourselves The Flower People as a joke.
DAVYD: Did any of the songs you were working on then make it on your CD?
RYAN: Our song “Forgo” is on our album and that’s one of those songs, “Dead Language” is also on our album. We also have a couple songs on Projekt compilations.
SUZANNE: That’s pretty much how we started, I was just basically fooling around. He had a lot of instrumental stuff and I just started humming on it and it worked.
“You know how when you’re a kid and you get out of the swimming pool? This tea smells like that,” explains Suzanne Perry, LSD’s vocalist. She passes the cup to guitarist, Ryan Lum, and then onto myself and we agree, amazed at the purity of her asseement. We’ve gathered in the duo’s comfortable Westside apartment to discuss the release of ‘Ardor,’ their second full length record. Nearly two years have passed since the band’s debut, ‘Idylls,’ and the band has progressed admirably. One thing that strikes the listener as different is an ongoing sense of unity within ’Ardor,’ an intangible, um, concept.
“It dawned on me as I was finishing the album that the way I was mixing the song somehow tied them all together,” says Ryan.
“It has more of a sense of worldliness than the previous record,” reveals Suzanne. “When I was singing, I tried to be more personable.”
Projekt sent over a press clipping of a La Jornada newspaper review of our recent concert in Mexico City. Not sure how great this translation is, but here goes:
Recital with throat and guitar of the angelic duo
“That of Love Spirals Downwards, naked music in the Chopo”
by Pablo Espinosa
With the tenderness of a lullaby, the tenderness of a hologram, the smoothness of a wallflower, the voice of Suzanne Perry lived in the Poplar Museum on Thursday night in a beautiful appeasement, a soliloquy in a waning room, a sedative applied to the shoulder, the neck and the soles of the feet of the soul.
The rain could be heard in Suzanne Perry’s voice. The rains painted by Vicente Rojo, the rains that Saint John Perse sings, the waters of March announced like this.
The band appeared in many newspapers around Mexico City during their recent live appearance. One of the articles promoting the concert was in the daily tabloid-style newspaper, Unomásuno. Following is an English translation plus the original article.
Today at the Chopo Museum: Love Spirals Downwards and La Divina Comedia are Presented
by Javier Delgado
Regarding Love Spirals Downwards:
On their musical approach, Perry and Lum said: “We prefer to do things this way, naturally, because we believe that music is recreated in a much more intimate way…”
Perry and Lum do not consider themselves the typical musicians who are preoccupied with money or fans; there are more important things, like spirituality and the alternative of communicating through music with their peers. This is why the lyrics of their songs seek to transmit emotions, more than a message; “It is above all about something spiritual, mysterious.”
The music of Love Spirals Downwards aims to recover ancient traditions and early experimentation. Folk, psychedelia, and ethereal gothic are the main stylistic tendencies that fuse in their albums and in the songs that are compiled from them.
Regarding the initials LSD, they assured that it is not about promoting any drug, it is a simple coincidence: “We don’t take acid or anything like it, that has nothing to do with us.”
Love Spirals Downwards (LSD), today at the Chopo University Museum (Enrique González Martínez 10, Santa María la Ribera), at 7 PM.
Regarding La Divina Comedia and the Concert:
For the duo, the creative possibilities in the Dark Ethereal style are very great, and that’s why in every new disc they try to broaden their vocabulary and frequently work with a dulcimer, a percussive melodic instrument that adds a new nuance to their music.
For Suzanne Perry, the strongest influences haven’t been those from the musical world that has surrounded her life, but rather the inspiration comes directly from her current working environment.
For their part, Cristina and Vicente, from the group La Divina Comedia, commented that they have been creating this type of music for three years, a time in which they have found spaces oriented toward aggressive punk, which they alternate with LSD to have the possibility of showing their work within a similar musical environment to the one they have developed.
(Javier Delgado)
Love Spirals Downwards article from Unomasuno, February 28, 1995
“Into a Well of the Looking Glass” by Aaron Johnston
I was always involved with the ethereal music scene, but never to the degree where it became a driving passion. The nature and tone of the music was, in essence, a very articulate reflection of who I was in self, but there were simply no bands I knew of pushing the sound beyond its gates to a point of unavoidable adoration on my part. It wasn’t simply a matter of finding the perfect band, but of finding the perfect window. Through time and dedication, any group could eventually release an album with the most delicately perfect instrumentation and ideally placed melodic trim, but what is it if there is no decisive emotional push behind it? This question was at the forefront of my mind for many years, and was finally answered one evening as I sat down to listen to a prodigal young instrumentalist named Ryan Lum conspire with an astonishingly angelic vocalist named Suzanne Perry under the name Love Spirals Downwards.
Within a matter of moments, the two managed to capture a well of feelings and affections wrought with a long-held yearning for excommunication and deliverance; a subtle and pure exorcism of the soul. I always thought this kind of experience was a bit too “new age” to be truly revealed to anyone living in the real world, but I was disproved time and time again with each successive listen. I was, in all honesty, baffled by the two arms which were weaving me through the first stages of my spiritual and emotional re-education. Ryan and Suzanne had me wrapped around their fingers, plain and simple. Rather than a feeling of manipulation, however, I was a willing participant. Although it was the effort of two, the group worked almost in a doubled unison. I was traded between Ryan’s deep guitar and keyboard exchanges and Suzanne’s beautiful vocal raptures time and again with abandon. In essence, it felt as if I were being led along by a single hand with two separate bodies, two distinct minds thinking and reacting as one.
Some music exists in a dreamlike world of softened colors and indistinct images, where words are scarcely remembered and beauty is the only thing of value. Perhaps this music speaks to us in a wordless language of the peace before birth and the worlds beyond waking reality. The only certainty is that it spirals gracefully downwards through layers of mystery like the depths of an enchanted ocean. This is the music of Love Spirals Downwards: the music of dreams and worlds beyond. Love Spirals Downwards is the voice of Suzanne Perry and the music of Ryan Lum on synthesizers, samplers and guitars.
MUSE: The Projekt label says they produce ethereal, gothic and dark ambient music. Which description most suits your music?
Suzanne: I don’t mind being attached to ethereal so much as being called a 4AD type That’s too specific. Ethereal is more vaguely descriptive.
Ryan: It could be The Moon Seven Times; it could be us; it could be The Sundays. It’s a very broad term.
