There were a few things that happened in the past few months regarding our music distribution that I would like to mention. The German release of Ever happened a few months back, with EFA being the new distributor for Projekt in Germany. And in the United States, we now have great distribution here through ADA, a Warner subsidiary.
Many people have written to us saying how difficult it was to find Ever and our other releases. I too had a tough time finding them. Now our CDs are everywhere once again: Tower, Borders, and all sorts of other stores. So, if you haven’t got it yet, now’s the perfect time to get a copy of Ever .
“ONE THING I LIKE ABOUT OUR NEW album is that it’s almost impossible to categorize with any of the conventional musical categories,” declares Ryan Lum, guitarist and keyboard player for Love Spirals Downwards. “There are really folky songs, really electronic ambient dance songs, and then these weird, loopy psychedelic songs. I think it all works together really well. It isn’t a huge shock from one to the next.”
Lum and vocalist Suzanne Perry create a lush, inviting sonic template on their third and newest album, Ever. Important components to their sound are Perry’s beautiful, dreamy vocals, Lum’s delicate, sometimes cryptic acoustic six-string melodies, and their integration of swirling keyboards and subtle effects, all of which produce a captivating kind of romantic, ethereal folk.
Live, Lum uses two tunings: standard and E A D G A D, a variation on D A D G A D. “Instead of my first note being D, it’s E,” he says. “That way, all the strings are tuned normally except for the high two strings, so I can fret chords on the low strings as I normally would and have all those drones on the top two strings.”
Love Spirals Downwards “Sideways Forest” CD-Single Review by Brent
Continuing on consistently after Ardor and Idyls, the first EP from Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry has them once again producing a dreamy mixture of female voice and swirls of guitar. Here, through, and on their wonderful third album Ever, I’d argue they’ve matured and refocussed a bit. “Sideways Forest” is perhaps the most lovely thing they’ve created to date, both nicely grounded and earthy and rising to the ether on jets of blazing guitars. When all is said and done, there will be an ambient remix of every single song ever written. The “Quantum Remix” does this for the preceding track, adding about two minutes in the process. It’s nice and dreamy. The final one, “Amarillo,” almost at once softly subdues you under a spell of half-remembered dreams and cloudy waking-thoughts. It actually sounds a lot like Soul Whirling Somewhere, building up to and melding into a droning fog. Mesmerizing! 10 lilies.
Love Spirals Downwards is only nominally a band. Really, they are something more of a recording project undertaken by the duo of Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry, just having fun with their music in a home studio. The result, though, has been three albums of atmospheric, ethereal music that has the ability to transport the listener in remarkable ways. Lum and Perry have degrees in philosophy and psychology, respectively. The effectiveness of the music makes one wonder how much of their academic training plays into their art, though they tend to deny any specific influence. Their first two albums, Idylls and Ardor, were critically acclaimed, and even if this isn’t exactly the stuff of top-forty hits, they developed a solid following. Ever, their latest effort (on the Projekt label), will likely take these musicians even farther, although that may not have been their intention in recording it.
PHF: I’m only familiar with your current album, Ever. Are the previous two albums similar in tone?
Ryan: They are similar in a certain respect. I think they are very different in a certain respect. We don’t like to make the same album. Once we’ve done it, we like to move on and do something different. The first one, Idylls, is more dreamy-sounding, more eastern, more like Indian music, not much intelligible English. The guitars are more processed. It’s a floaty-airy kind of record. The second one, Ardor, is more poppy, I guess? We have some structured pop songs. She sings in English a bit more. There are less effects on the guitars. Ever branches out in all different directions. Each of the previous two had a certain sound that was at the core of it all. Ever just went off every which way that we indulged ourselves in.
Love Spirals Downward is only nominally a band. Really, they are something of a recording project undertaken by the duo of Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry, just having fun with their music in a home studio. The result, though, has been three albums of atmospheric, ethereal music that has the ability to transport the listener in remarkable ways.
“We develop it and do it all at home,” explains Lum. “We’ve got our own home recording studio. We’ve had it for years and have just been growing and expanding it. We’re pretty well equipped to do it all at home. In fact, the way we write, too, we have to do it at home. We don’t make up 10 or 11 songs and say, ‘Okay! Time to go to the studio and record all the songs!’ I’ll have some rough sounds or ideas and I’ll record them down on tape or into the sampler, and from there I’ll start getting more ideas. It will build from what I previously recorded. That wold be a very costly, practically impossible, thing to do in the studio. We would be racking up the kind of budget of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ or something like that.”
Their first two albums, Idylls and Ardor, were critically acclaimed, and even if this isn’t exactly the stuff of Top 40 hits, they developed a solid following. Ever, their latest efforts, will likely take these musicians even farther, although that may not have been their intention in recording it.
“I really loathe the music business,” Perry exclaims. “I really don’t think about it. I hope people have a good experience — or a positive experience — but beyond that I don’t expect people to get much from it. That’s not my intention when I make it. I don’t even know why I do it. It’s fun for me. It’s fun. When you get past that, you get into trouble. Nobody ever experiences anything like you want them to. And who am I to want people to experience in a certain way? Beyond that, I can’t even control that… I can’t control if people are going to buy it, or even care about it.”
The domestic release of our new full-length Ever was right on schedule and should now have made its way to stores. It will soon be released in Europe. If you are having trouble finding it, either here or abroad, you can order directly from Projekt. We hope that you’ll check out both Ever and the Sideways Forest CD-single as they are quite different from each other. Apart from the “Sideways Forest” track, the other 2 songs on the CD-single are unavailable elsewhere and are unlike anything else we’ve released.
Projekt has some very nice color posters for Ever as well as a new Love Spirals Downwards t-shirt. Try contacting Projekt or calling their 800-CD-LASER phone number for more information.
For next year, plans are being made for some West Coast and East Coast shows. I’ll post more about that later as more information develops.
Love Spirals Downwards recently appeared in the German fanzine, Black. The following is an English translation of the interview by Thomas Wacker.
The reputation of the “Ethereal Wave” precedes PROJEKT mainly because this label, next to BLACK TAPE FOR A BLUE GIRL, has one of the best—if not the best—”Heavenly Voices” bands: LOVE SPIRALS DOWNWARDS. This is Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry, who first caused a sensation in 1992 with their debut album, ‘Idylls.’ Suzanne’s angelic, lovely voice especially delights critics and journalists, and their global fan community continues to grow.
Already in the 3rd edition of BLACK, I tried to interview Ryan Lum and failed miserably because I tried to interpret too much into the music and the meaning, and he simply wouldn’t give any information on this. I don’t want to give the impression that Ryan and Suzanne think they are above their music, and I certainly don’t want to defame the artists… no, on the contrary, I like the music of LOVE SPIRALS DOWNWARDS very much. Nevertheless, it is my job as a journalist to engage with the music and the artist and convey a picture of both to the readers.
Our CD-single, Sideways Forest, will be released on August 1, 1996, and the new full-length album will follow on September 15.
Sean from Eden will be staying with us here for the next two weeks and we will be collaborating together in our studio to see what happens (maybe there’ll be an EP sometime in the future?). Plus, I think he will really dig Disneyland and seeing Jim Morrison’s house in Venice Beach. I would also like to say thanks to everyone who said hello to us at the recent Projekt Fest in Chicago.
And, check the Projekt News for more info on our two upcoming shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
This Florida-based Heavy Metal ‘zine reached out for an interview, which was a fun change of pace. The following is a transcript:
Love Spirals Downwards. You may not be familiar with this name. Sure, it’s not a HM band. It’s from another underground genre, Ambient. LSD is organized by just two persons: Ryan & Suzanne. He basically does all the instructions in this music, and she does the haunting ethereal vocals. This is the topnotch atmospheric music I really recommend to listen to. Just buy and check all their 3 albums out. They are the high quality music. Well, this interview will more interest you.
SOM: Are you guys vegetarians? Do you still have a thing with Subway or Taco Bell?
Ryan: I prefer Taco bell, though. I used to be a vegetarian. But after living with Suzanne, it’s hard to not eat meat, so I’ll eat it. I don’t feel too bad about it though, because humans are basically scavengers. We are both omnivores and carnivores, so in nature humans have eaten whatever was there, meat or vegetable, to stay alive. But, I still don’t eat much meat. You could call me a bad vegetarian. Taco Bell is still as my favorite fast food.
SOM: Well, if you categorize yourselves as Gothic, it’s not a common form of Goth today, don’t you think? I mean, Goth is sometimes much stronger than emotional side of it. Please tell us how Gothic (musically, and else) you are.
Ryan: I’m about as gothic as Snoop Doggy Dogg. I’ve never categorized myself, nor my art, as gothic. I really don’t understand where people get this idea that we are gothic. All one needs is to listen to our music, or take a look at us, and it’s quite obvious that we have nothing to do with that whole thing. I think it’s because Projekt has a lot of Goths that like their releases, so we mistakenly get categorized as Gothic because some Gothic people buy our music. But that’s unfair and not accurate because many kinds of people buy our music. When we play shows, most often the people I meet who are our fans are just more regular sort of people, like ourselves. I think our music falls into this area of Ambient music that borders a little with acoustic folk, pop, and more dancey groovy stuff.
For Ryan Lum, instrumentalist for the L.A. based duo, Love Spirals Downwards, sticking to just one means of musical expression is not an option.
“I go between making this pure acoustic music and then going into this analog synthesizer, drum machine sound, tweaking knobs and stuff — just to keep things fun! If I did the same thing for a while, I’d get burnt out!”
Combined with the truly beautiful vocals of Suzanne Perry, Lum’s work in Love Spirals Downwards is a lush, wondrous experience. The band’s third album, Ever, has just been released on Projekt, and clearly demonstrates that Lum and Perry have moved from being simply fine disciples of the Cocteau Twins school of performance to becoming distinctly intriguing artists in their own right.
For Lum, the question of influence is a tricky one, reflecting the tension between inspiration and the need to be one’s own person.
“It’s hard to say which bands listen to are my influences and which are not. I guess everything I listen to somehow gets mixed up in what I do. That’s a tough question, because I don’t know what I’m trying to get away from, or what I’m trying to be like.”
