Love Spirals Downwards’ sophomore album Ardor represents the peak of the band’s Projekt-era sound—lush, meditative, and meticulously sculpted around Ryan Lum’s increasingly sophisticated production. Following their debut, Idylls (1992), Lum and Perry refined their individual approaches rather than reinventing the project outright. Lum expanded the sonic palette with layered guitars and richer atmospheric depth, weaving elements of the burgeoning shoegaze scene into their signature ethereal sound. Perry, meanwhile, began to move away from the “nonsense lyrics” that characterized their earlier work, introducing more structured English on several songs while still utilizing the evocative, non-linguistic textures that defined the band’s essence. The album also marked the duo’s first foray into collaboration, introducing outside voices and new compositional textures that would expand the record’s emotional terrain.
Released through Projekt Records in the U.S. on CD and cassette, and licensed to Hyperium Records for European CD release, Ardor arrived in mid-1994. The album matched the commercial success of their debut but with a much faster trajectory; by 1995, label founder Sam Rosenthal noted in the Projekt Darkwave Europe Catalog that it was “wonderfully exciting to see the music we release so greatly recognized,” highlighting that Ardor was already becoming one of the label’s biggest sellers.
While both Idylls and Ardor eventually reached 15,000-copy sales milestones, Ardor’s rapid ascent cemented the duo’s status as a cornerstone of the Projekt roster. The official promotion for the release captured the essence of this new era:
“‘Ardor’ abounds with rich layered textures of affected electric and acoustic guitars created by Ryan Lum combining with the beautiful harmonizing voices of vocalist Suzanne Perry, enveloping the listener in a world of beauty… where words and meaning are meaningless and where emotion and beauty prevail.”
From Idylls to Ardor: A More Cohesive Vision
Love Spirals Downwards’ debut, Idylls, was built in large part from instrumental demos Ryan Lum had written years prior. In contrast, Ardor was crafted with a clearer sonic vision, resulting in a more cohesive and refined sound. In a 1994 interview with Jon Gonzalez—conducted for an official Projekt promotional cassette and later excerpted in Fond Affexxions Issue 5 (Winter Thaw 1995)—Lum reflected on this shift:
“Our first album, more so than this one, was a collection of songs. A lot of those songs I had never intended to be released; they were just demos that got turned into real songs. On this new album, since we were signed, obviously I knew they were going to be released. As far as a concept, I had more of a sound concept… The way I mixed the songs tied them all together.”
This unified “sound concept” was promoted through various channels, including a dedicated promotional cassette released by Projekt in 1994. Serving as a bridge between projects, the tape functioned as a vehicle for both Ardor and Of These Reminders—a various-artists tribute to Black Tape for a Blue Girl released the same year. It featured the Ardor track “Write in Water” alongside one of the band’s contributions to the tribute album, a cover of “Could I Stay the Honest One?”, appearing alongside the Gonzalez interview.
Through these releases, the duo began to signal a departure from the musical landscape of their debut. While Idylls blended ethereal, darkwave, and classical Indian influences—often driven by heavy tribal beats from an Alesis HR-16 drum machine—their sophomore release introduced more immersive textures and laid-back, shoegaze-inspired rhythms. Projekt’s press release framed this transition as both a continuation and a refinement:
“On their new album Ardor, Love Spirals Downwards continues their dream-like sound with a blissful and uplifting feel that picks up from the slightly darker, almost Eastern, sound of their debut.”
In a pre-release interview with Danse Macabre (published in Issue 3, 1995), Perry noted Idylls‘ range: “The album… sounds pretty diverse. It jumps around a lot from many different sounds. Our new album sounds really different from that.” Ryan agreed: “Yeah, our first album is really schizophrenic but it all flows together from side to side. It’s really different from our new one.”
This shift from a scattered collection of songs to a more deliberate and unified artistic vision paved the way for Ardor‘s exploration of shoegaze-inspired soundscapes and experimental techniques, which became central to the album’s identity.
Studio Alchemy: The Tools Behind Ardor’s Sound
Despite the album’s expanded sonic reach, Ryan Lum created Ardor using a remarkably consistent home-studio setup—much of it carried over from the recording of Idylls. He continued to rely on his Tascam 388 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, the Alesis HR-16 drum machine, Roland DEP-3, Boss DC-2 Digital Dimension chorus pedal—as well as his primary guitars, a Gibson Les Paul electric and an Ovation 6-string acoustic. While he had utilized the EBow on their debut, it became far more central to Ardor’s identity; its sustained, bowed tone appeared variously as texture, melodic substitute, and extended solo across tracks including “Mirrors A Still Sky,” “Kykeon,” “Depression Glass,” and “Avicenna.”
What changed most dramatically was not the gear itself, but the freedom Lum acquired in using it.
For Idylls, he had been forced to rent a DAT machine for final mixdowns—an expensive, nerve-wracking limitation that left him feeling rushed. Determined not to repeat the experience, he purchased a professional Tascam DA-30 DAT deck for Ardor, allowing him to mix down tracks at home, without a clock running or a rental deadline looming. For the final album mix, he borrowed a rack-mounted Roland Dimension D from a former collaborator — the same unit he had borrowed for Idylls — routing various tracks through it via an effects bus to unify the album’s stereo field.
The other major addition to his arsenal was the Lexicon Jam Man looper pedal, a device that became central to the album’s increasingly experimental and shoegaze-inflected passages. Its ability to capture and recycle fragments of sound in real time enabled Lum to build the drifting, recursive atmospheres heard across Ardor—particularly on pieces where looping, texture, and improvisation replaced traditional songwriting structures.
This heavy emphasis on looping and atmosphere occasionally led listeners to mistake his guitar-based textures for keyboard work. In a 1995 interview with BigO journalist Zulkifli Othman, Lum clarified that the album’s “apparent brightness” actually stemmed from more complex electric textures than the “plainer acoustic guitars on Idylls.” He further addressed the perceived use of synthesizers in that same Danse Macabre interview, noting that while minimal keyboards were used to hold steady notes for texture, the core of the sound remained fundamentally guitar-driven: “People have asked me if there was something else. On a couple of the songs, we use minimal keyboards. Basically, we hold the same note down through the whole song.”
Ultimately, Lum’s process was one of discovery through sound rather than rigid intention. As he explained to Requiem in 1996: “I’ll have all my effects together and when I’m recording, I just start plugging different ones in to make different sounds. A lot of times I make songs just from messing around with sound. I don’t even intend to write a song, I just mess around with new effects trying to make some sounds, and the sound of all of it will inspire me.”
Together, these tools didn’t radically alter Lum’s process so much as empower it, giving him the space and stability to push Love Spirals Downwards’ sound into deeper, more immersive territory. Ardor may feel larger and more intricate than its predecessor, but at its core, it is the product of a modest home studio—and of a musician refining his craft through careful, incremental expansion rather than wholesale reinvention.
Expanding the Sonic Palette: The Shoegaze Influence on Ardor
With Ardor, Ryan Lum’s musical influences broadened significantly, moving beyond the band’s initial 4AD-inspired roots to embrace the atmospheric textures of the UK shoegaze scene and the rhythmic experimentation of early-90s British electronica. In a 1994 interview with Dusk Memories, Lum described a palette that had become increasingly multi-dimensional: “I’ve been influenced by many artists from different genres, including Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Slowdive, The Orb, Primal Scream, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and The Beatles.”
This eclectic range was not merely theoretical; it began to manifest in the very architecture of Ardor. The influence of psychedelic legends like Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead is felt in the soaring, melodic phrasing of his guitar work—notably on “Tear Love From My Mind,” a precursor to the Gilmour-inflected tones he would later refine, and on “Subsequently,” which captures the improvisational, late-60s spirit of Jerry Garcia.
Simultaneously, the inclusion of acts like The Orb and Primal Scream provided the early seeds for his future electronic explorations. The ambient, spacey influence of The Orb is evident in the drifting textures of Ardor’s “Sunset Bell,” a sound that would later evolve into the more layered, dubby version found on 1998’s Flux. Similarly, the rhythmic sensibility of Primal Scream and the ‘baggy’ beats of the Madchester scene surfaced in the shuffling percussion of ‘Will You Fade’—a departure from the more static arrangements of their debut—an approach he would explore further on 1996’s Ever.
In a 1995 interview with Singapore music magazine BigO, he was direct about where he saw the band sitting: “I consider bands like the Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Closedown, and ourselves to be in the same genre, which can be fairly called ‘ethereal.’” Still, he noted a shift in his aesthetic leanings in that same Dusk Memories interview, “A long time ago (1986–88), I was very passionate about 4AD artists, especially the Cocteau Twins, but my subsequent evolution led me to more psychedelic bands like the Popul Vuh of the early 70s.”
In a February/March 1995 interview with Muse, Perry reframed what those earlier inspirations had actually meant to her, “Making that connection to The Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance was the realization that, ‘They make music, so can we.’ What we learned when we had the opportunity to meet them was that they’re not mysterious. You know, when you’re fourteen or fifteen years old they seem so different from everyone else.”
The press, however, was quick to settle on a single comparison.
Navigating the “Clone” Narrative
In the April 1995 issue of Alternative Press—a major industry publication with a subscriber base in the tens of thousands and a print run reaching the 100,000 range—the magazine opened a review of Ardor with a declaration that must have felt both flattering and constraining:
“LSD’s second album continues their efforts in filling the musical chasm left by the Cocteau Twins when they departed from the milky musical terrain for more commercial venues.”
Reviewer Michael C. Mahan —the same writer who had earlier reviewed Idylls—was not wrong to hear the kinship — “the droning, quivering layers of electric and acoustic guitars, minimal drums, and just the right amount of synthetic keys as needed for texture.” But he was careful to note where Perry diverged from Elizabeth Fraser:
“Perry’s lovely vocals are soft with a cathedral ambience, not prone to the theatrics for which Fraser is noted. Her vocals fade gently into the droning backdrop rather than soaring above them.”
While Elizabeth Fraser often functioned as a virtuosic lead—soaring over the music—Perry operated as part of the texture, dissolving into the soundscape. Yet Mahan’s closing line—“Their old banner has been picked up and held high by a pair who will not let it drop”—still planted the duo firmly in the Cocteau Twins shadow.
Perry, however, was particularly wary of the path the Cocteau Twins had taken on their most recent album, Four-Calendar Café. In The Ninth Wave, she laid out her artistic boundaries with striking directness: “There is more English on Ardor, but I don’t want to do a Cocteau Twins. On their last record, you can finally understand what she’s saying, but it’s so disappointing. There’s this beautiful, transcendent music, and her singing about being molested ruins the whole thing for me. It brought them down to earth, in my mind.”
The difference between the two singers was captured perfectly by The Ninth Wave‘s founder, Liisa Ladouceur, who argued in her review of Ardor that while the music could conjure the same emotions as the Cocteau Twins, the duo had successfully established their own voice:
“Lazy writers will call LSD a Cocteau Twins knock-off and leave you with that. While listening to them can conjure the same emotions as CT (serenity, beauty in sadness, daydreaming), they have their own voice. Actually, Suzanne Perry’s voice is quite intelligible, unlike Fraser’s. When she whispers ‘I go dizzy’ in the opening track ‘Will You Fade’, you can sit back and relax rather than play guess the code language.”
Meanwhile, Lum was focused on redirecting the conversation entirely. In Danse Macabre, he pushed back with characteristic dryness, “One review I saw compared us to the Cocteau Twins, circa Garlands album. I know they have to compare us to something, but how about Slowdive?”
The Garlands reference was telling. The Cocteau Twins’ 1982 debut is a dark, post-punk record built on ominous bass lines, stark drum machine rhythms, and Fraser’s vocals as a blend of invented words and obscure phrases. While some of those elements were certainly present in Love Spirals Downwards’ debut, Idylls, by the time Ardor arrived, the band had evolved beyond them. The guitars were warmer, the textures more layered and immersive, and the emotional register drifted closer to the enveloping atmosphere of Slowdive’s Pygmalion than the jagged edges of Garlands. Lum seemed to be arguing that the Cocteau Twins comparison had already expired—and the press just hadn’t caught up.
Carpe Noctem magazine came closest to threading the needle between both critical perspectives. Where Alternative Press heard a Cocteau Twins heir, Carpe Noctem recognized something far more self-contained:
“Instead of repetitive, trite, overkill which plagues many bands who try too hard to create music that fits a particular ‘style,’ LSD remove themselves from the outside world and concentrate on their own unique visions and inspirations.”
While Lum expanded the instrumental palette beyond early comparisons, Perry’s evolving vocal and lyrical approach drew even sharper scrutiny from critics like Alternative Press.
The Voice as Atmosphere: Perry’s Lyrical Process
While Ryan Lum was redirecting the band’s sonic identity, Suzanne Perry was navigating her own role within that sound—not through a calculated strategy, but through intuition. In their 1994 interview with Jon Gonzalez, she admitted that any shift in her approach on Ardor wasn’t part of a premeditated blueprint. Instead, it was often a subconscious response to the music and early feedback. She recalled criticisms from Alternative Press suggesting that songs on Idylls were too short: “I think I did shoot for using more lyrics,” and “trying to make things longer… but I don’t think any of it was really, like, well thought out. I don’t think I planned it.”
This lack of rigid planning extended to the very nature of her lyrics. When Gonzalez noted a perceived shift:
“When I listen to Idylls, I think it just is kind of an escapist, “take me away…” Listen to the lush sounds, listen to the beautiful voice. When I listen to Ardor, I get more of a feeling…like there’s an idea kinda coming into it, not just colors and wash… It’s starting to become more tangible.”
Perry described this as a natural emotional response rather than an artistic pivot: “I think it does have a little bit more worldliness about it… when I was singing, I was trying to attach more… I was trying to be more personable with it.”
Even her decision to use more English lyrics was instinctive. When asked what had changed regarding her previous lack of interest in conveying a “message,” she clarified that the goal hadn’t actually changed: ”I’d still say there’s isn’t really a message, I mean, it may have gotten a little bit more personal with lyrics but… Honestly, making nonsense lyrics, I felt like it was going to be kind of the same experience if I did that again. I tried not to say, “OK, I’m not going to use any lyrics at all.” I dunno! I didn’t really think about it much, I just kinda did it.”
As before, her process was intuitive, rather than intellectual, taking place within the strict confines of Lum’s studio. Responding to Gonzales’ probe as to whether she still wrote the lyrics after hearing the compositions, Perry stated, “Always. Yeah. Still the same. After I hear the music, then write the lyrics. I didn’t have any of these lyrics written prior to hearing the music, and all lyrics were written for that particular song. It wasn’t like I had a book, and I took the lyrics out of a book I’d been writing lyrics in.”
For Perry, the use of English wasn’t about clarity or storytelling, but about texture. She viewed words as another layer of atmosphere, rather than a vehicle for meaning: “I feel like I’m using words but I’m still not really conveying any definite meaning… I don’t feel like they have a direct meaning… to everybody, like a universal meaning.” This intuitive approach—treating the voice as an instrument and the lyrics as “pretty meaningless” in a direct sense—created the unique tension of Ardor. It was this very balance between intelligibility and abstraction that would eventually spark the debate over which songs were fit to be singles, as Gonzalez directly probed in their 1994 interview.
Album Single Dilemma: Write in Water or Will You Fade
While Ardor was conceived as a cohesive album experience, the question of which track might represent it best proved less straightforward. In the mid-1990s, Projekt Records rarely issued traditional singles. Physical media was expensive to manufacture and distribute, and the label focused almost exclusively on full-length releases on CD and cassette. Instead, exposure often came through compilation appearances, college radio airplay, and — occasionally — the possibility of a music video.
When asked by Jon Gonzalez in their 1994 interview if one track had to stand in for the album, perhaps as the basis for a single or video, which should it be? The debate revealed subtle but meaningful differences in how the duo viewed their own work.
The Case for “Will You Fade”
Gonzalez made his stance clear immediately, pointing to “Will You Fade” not for its historical resonance, but for its kinetic energy and accessibility. To him, the song’s structure made it the obvious candidate for wider exposure: “It kinda builds, has a momentum, a great hook, and it’s got English lyrics — so that was my choice for a single.”
The emotional urgency of “Will You Fade” is built slowly, culminating in a sudden jolt once the full texture arrives. Gonzalez compared this impact to the opening of Slowdive’s “Alison” from Souvlaki:
“It just, like, ‘BOOM!’ It just slammed me right into it.”
The track’s structure reveals exactly why that moment hits so hard. “Will You Fade” opens with a forty-second swell of atmospheric guitar and hypnotic bass, leaving the soundscape open before Perry’s voice tentatively enters with “I’m finding missing you much deeper.” The song’s restraint is notable; it isn’t until 2:37 that the drums finally enter to anchor the arrangement. At this mark, the existing guitar textures expand into a thick wall of sound, utilizing heavily affected strums to push the momentum forward.
This shift centers on the lyric “and I grow dizzy,” a phrase that soon adopts a hypnotic, repeating role, functioning as the track’s primary hook. At 3:07, the arrangement deepens further as additional chiming guitars join the mix and Perry adds a soaring high harmony, building tension toward Lum’s triumphant guitar solo at 3:50. The track reaches its emotional peak as Perry delivers one final refrain—“and I grow dizzy, I am out of myself”—while the distorted guitars hold a long, resonant note and slowly fade into silence.
Musically, the track encapsulates many of the elements Lum saw as defining the band’s evolving sound. When Projekt’s Pat Ogle later asked him in the 1997 ProjektFest Guide to name one track that best represented Love Spirals Downwards, Lum notably replied: “Maybe ‘Will You Fade’ from Ardor, because that song has most of the elements of our sound all in one song. Plus, it’s one of my favorites.”
Asked what those elements were, he described them with characteristic technical clarity: “The combo of the voice and harmonies, acoustic guitars, spacey electric guitars, and the mellow break-beat drums.” Yet even as Ardor drew from that sonic palette, Lum was already beginning to distance himself from it. Reflecting on the record only a few years after its release, he admitted with characteristic candor:
“I think it’s starting to feel kind of dated for me now, though — too shoegazey. And that whole thing has been a bit dead without any more albums from, say, Slowdive, or My Bloody Valentine. We’re finding new ways to get our sound without relying on that setup.”
The remark captures the strange timing of Ardor. Released just as the first wave of shoegaze was fading — with bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine largely silent by the mid-1990s — the album both embraced and quietly moved beyond the genre’s sonic vocabulary.
While Lum championed the track as a quintessential blueprint of their evolving sound, Perry’s personal relationship to it was initially far more ambivalent. On KSPC’s Generation Death — a 1995 joint interview with tour-mates Trance to the Sun — DJ Wednesday announced “Will You Fade” as the band’s favorite track from the album. Perry immediately clarified, “Yeah, it’s one of Ryan’s favorites.”
Lum jokingly pressed back, “Oh, it’s not one of yours?” before adding that he thought it was “the most interesting textural kind of song I made on the album.” Perry responded more cautiously, “Well, I don’t know what my favorite is. It’s hard because I have different favorites at different times.”
In the earlier Gonzalez interview she ultimately conceded that –of the two potential singles, she had a strong preference
The Counterpoint: “Write in Water”
If “Will You Fade” captured Lum’s vision of the band’s expanding sonic palette, “Write in Water” offered a more introspective thread within Ardor. Gonzalez described it as a bridge between the pop immediacy of the new album and the layered dreamlike textures of Idylls: “It felt rooted in the first record — like a progression from the first record, in a pop sense, but not as strongly as ‘Will You Fade.’”
The song’s opening line draws directly on medieval language: “My lief es far en londe” (“My love is far away.”)
This subtle archaic touch recalls the aesthetic vocabulary of the band’s debut. The title and refrain deepen the theme of impermanence, echoing the famous epitaph of the Romantic poet John Keats — “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
“Lost, lost in what seems / That’s how it should be /
Who, who is to see? / We write in water / Now.”
Despite these literary resonances, Perry and Lum resisted the idea that they were deliberately drawing from poetry or scholarship. During their Generation Death interview, Perry dismissed the notion that they were a “literary band”: “We don’t use a lot of books or poetry in doing music.” Lum added: “Yeah, we’re not the heavy literature types, but we do read a lot.”
Perry later revisited the song in The Ninth Wave, acknowledging that its depth had surprised even her: “I never realized all the images it evokes. The song ‘Write in Water’ has so many different subconscious levels, and I spent so little time planning it.”
Her uncertainty about the lyrics reflected a broader discomfort with autobiographical writing: “I guess I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to write. I don’t necessarily think it’s my gift… And I don’t know how much I want to reveal of myself, like the really personal stuff.”
Mysticism and Meaning: “Avicenna”
“Avicenna” introduces a striking cultural contrast. The title references the famed Persian philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age, yet the lyrics themselves draw from Christian scripture, echoing the devotional language of the Psalms. Perry had drawn on sacred source material before — “This Endris Night” on Idylls had borrowed from a medieval Christian lullaby — and “Avicenna” continues that instinct, trading medieval hymnody for the devotional language of the Psalms.
Several lines echo Psalm 119, with its emphasis on divine law and guidance:
“Teach me all of Thy ways Lord / Statutes and I shall heed
Heal me and I shall heed Thy laws / Show me”
The chorus appears to reference another passage as well. Perry’s line, “Unto Thee lifting up mine eyes / Awesomely to be healed” closely recalls Psalm 123, which opens: “Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens.”
The juxtaposition of an Islamic philosophical namesake with lyrics drawn from Christian scripture gives the piece an unexpected cross-cultural resonance — a convergence of spiritual traditions that mirrors the band’s broader tendency to treat religious imagery less as doctrine than as atmosphere.
That impression aligns with Perry’s own description of her writing process. In conversation with Jon Gonzalez, she explained that the lyrics were rarely planned in advance: “I didn’t have any of these lyrics written prior to hearing the music… All lyrics were written for each song, like, for that particular song. It wasn’t like I had a book, and I took the lyrics out of a book I’d been writing lyrics in.” In a 1998 KUCI interview, she acknowledged having attended a religious school, hinting that these themes may have emerged subconsciously — consistent with the pattern she had already identified in “Write in Water.”
Critics responded strongly to the song’s meditative atmosphere. Chart described it as “especially lovely… The duo of Suzanne Perry and Ryan Lum create meditative song scapes that draw the listener into a faintly medieval, quasi-Celtic world of echoes and promises, passions and rain.” Slut Cone took a more pastoral view: “Music for summer corn fields… ‘Avicenna’ brings out the pre-Raphaelite in you.”
Embracing Nonsense: “Subsequently“
Perry’s glossolalia technique, previously heard across much of Idylls, resurfaces on “Subsequently” in a more deliberate and thematic form. As she explained in a Carpe Noctem interview: “We get a mood for a song, and if I think it has an Italian or Latin mood to it, I’ll try to almost mimic that language to evoke that sort of mood. The songs in that way — at least on Ardor — are more thematic. Ardor has been a bit different. I thought I’d maybe write some words to it.”
Rather than conveying a concrete narrative, “Subsequently” treats the voice as an instrument — Perry’s layered vocals moving fluidly through the track, using phonetic sounds to evoke emotion rather than articulate thought. She expanded on the philosophy behind this in their 1995 Generation Death interview: “To me, it’s very separate — writing poetry or writing prose, literature and that is completely separate from music. I think that’s why a lot of times we use non-sensical syllables and just whatever sounds good. I guess it’s more about sound for us, it’s about sounding beautiful — or whatever we want it to sound like.” It was also, by her own admission, her favorite track on the album. When pressed in that same interview — Lum joking that if someone had “put a gun to your head and said, ‘Pick one!'” — Perry didn’t hesitate: “It’s ‘Subsequently.’ That’s my favorite. That’s definitely my favorite.”
But the return to glossolalia wasn’t just about aesthetics. In a 1995 interview with Muse, Perry acknowledged the emotional relief of it directly: “It’s a lot harder for me to write words that are personal than to write nonsense lyrics, because I’m getting into things that I reveal about myself. I don’t know how comfortable I feel with expressing myself in that way or putting that into music.” Lum framed it as a broader artistic stance: “I think a lot of people come to singing with the assumption that bearing their soul is something that they need to do in their lyric writing. What we do is break that assumption.”
Critics heard that restraint as a virtue rather than a limitation. Carpe Noctem drew an instructive contrast:
“Where a lot of female vocalists –such as Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries– purposefully attempt to alter their naturally distinct voices into unnaturally beautiful sounds through drawn out cracks and moans, Perry hides behind no such masks. Her voice is one of the most radiant and spiritually unearthing I have ever heard and flows free and undisturbed with each projection.”
The implication was clear: Perry’s refusal to perform — to strain, theatricalize, or confess — was not absence but discipline.
Carpe Noctem extended that observation into a broader statement about what the band asked of their listeners: “The feelings you encounter while listening to this band are yours to conjure up and can exist in limitless variation; LSD’s only role is to provide a means for their release.” It was, in effect, a critical endorsement of the very philosophy Perry and Lum had articulated themselves — that sensation mattered more than statement, and that the listener’s interior life was the true instrument.
Projekt’s promotional material for the album leaned into this idea of the voice as pure sound. Describing the band’s style as “beyond language,” the label suggested that Perry’s vocals “transcend lyric and language,” while Lum’s guitars “swirl and spiral with bright atmospheric textures from a place beyond words.” In this framing, meaning was secondary to sensation — a space “where emotion and beauty prevail.”
That comfort with stepping back from direct expression was not only an aesthetic choice — it was also a practical response to the conditions under which Ardor was made.
Creating from a Distance: Experimentation and Instrumentals
Though Love Spirals Downwards had already established their signature dreamlike aesthetic, Perry and Lum had increasingly different perspectives on the role of music in their lives. Perry viewed it as one creative outlet among many, while Lum saw it as a deeper pursuit. Their differing levels of artistic investment, combined with their physical separation, shaped how Ardor came together.
Due to their academic commitments, Perry and Lum were often separated during the recording of Ardor. As Perry explained to Danse Macabre interview: “I’m in a Masters program and I’m doing my thesis, and he’s been doing a Ph.D. in a Philosophy program and trying to do an album. Actually, for the most part, he’s been in Santa Barbara and I’ve been in San Francisco.”
At the time of the sessions, Lum was returning on weekends to his family home in the Los Angeles area to write and record the instrumental foundations of the album — a home studio he had been building since the mid-1980s, when he acquired his first four-track. Eventually he moved the entire setup to San Francisco to finalize the record.
The strain of that distance — and of balancing two demanding academic programs with a creative project — was palpable. In the same interview, Perry was candid about her priorities: “I don’t think I could just sit and do only music, it wouldn’t be enough. Ryan’s been talking about not going to graduate school. We’ve just been spreading ourselves too thin. I’m not ready to just quit and do music now, I wouldn’t quit Psychology.”
She went on to admit: “I don’t know if I just view myself as a part-time artist or something. I don’t really identify with myself like that. I don’t reflect a lot on, ‘Well, what type of music shall I make,’ you know? It’s just what comes out.”
This physical distance significantly impacted the album’s creation and led Lum to explore creative solutions. Perry notably contributed lyrics to only five of the thirteen total tracks. In her absence, Lum manipulated some of her pre-recorded vocals, experimenting with reversing tracks to create eerie, layered effects: “Some of the stuff is played backwards, her voice we played backwards on some stuff, too.”
The best example of this is “Sidhe,” where Lum reversed the vocal track from the duo’s cover of “Could I Stay the Honest One,” recorded for the Of These Reminders compilation set, to haunting effect. Perry later mirrored the reversed playback by attempting to sing it forward, creating a surreal “backwards-forwards” effect. She described the process: “There was this one where we played my voice backwards and then I imitated what was playing backwards, forwards. So it’s like backwards-forwards. It’s really difficult to sing what is backwards. I really like it though, it sounds really cool.”
The result was a mesmerizing track that felt both ancient and otherworldly. The Chicago Maroon praised its mystical quality:
“The dark ‘Sidhe,’ with its chanted female backing vocal incantations takes you on a journey to the realms of Faery.”
Perry confided to Danse Macabre that she had hoped “Sídhe”—the Irish/Scottish mythological term for “people of the mounds” rather than “wind”—would be the title chosen for the then-upcoming album: “One of them is Sidhe, which he doesn’t like and the other one is even stupider. If you have any ideas we’ll give you credit. But I like Sidhe, it’s the Gaelic word for wind, which is so pretty. Also, my first dog was named Sid, after Sid Vicious.” While Perry may have found the alternatives “stupider,” a surviving list of titles in her own handwriting reveals just how many directions the duo was considering. Alongside the track names that eventually made it onto the record, Perry had tested several more poetic candidates. “As Certain As Color” appears twice on the page—once written directly under the band’s name as if to trial the visual branding—while “If Autumn Rises” and “I Could Find It Only By Chance” each appear three times, with the former heavily circled in ink at the top of the list. An early design mockup even shows that “Subsequently” was briefly considered as the namesake before the duo finally settled on Ardor.
A near-instrumental similarly enchants, despite its lack of narrative. “I Could Find It Only By Chance” features Perry humming the wordless vocal melody “La di, la di, da da da” repeatedly over Lum’s flowing guitar textures. The track evokes a meditative sorrow. As The Daily University Star described it:
“Lum’s guitars overlap and flow like water. Perry, who is at her most melancholy in this song, repeats the same mournful phrase over and over again. Luckily, the music does not rely on words to make the song, and the feeling, rather than the meaning, of the words comes through loud and clear.”
The album’s only pure instrumental piece, “Mirrors A Still Sky,” provided Lum with a chance to let his EBow skills shine unobstructed in a mid-album moment that drew comparisons to the duo’s earlier work by The Ninth Wave:
“Ardor is quite different from their previous work, while maintaining all the elements you already love. Until track five, when the opening chords of the instrumental lullaby ‘Mirrors A Still Sky’ bring you back to Idylls.”
But while these songs pushed Ardor’s sonic boundaries, two of its most unforgettable tracks emerged from a new collaboration—one that hinted at the band’s future evolution.
A New Voice and the Seeds of Ever
If Ardor represented the culmination of Love Spirals Downwards’ early sound, the appearance of Jennifer Ryan Fuller (now known as Jennifer Wilde) hinted at where Lum’s evolving musical ideas might lead next. In a 2008 appearance on Auralgasms Radio, Lum recalled meeting Wilde through mutual friends: “I lived in San Francisco when I was finishing the recording of Ardor. She was just a friend of a friend. That’s how I usually meet musicians instead of, like, ads in papers. I was just like, ‘Hey, you do something? Let’s check it out.’”
Wilde had been invited primarily to contribute to “Depression Glass,” where she adapted her poem Dream of Love into lyrics, bringing an evocative melancholy to the song’s sweeping arrangement. Perry and Wilde recorded the vocals together, with the two voices intertwining to striking effect. Wilde later reflected on her blog: “I recorded this song with Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry of the band Love Spirals Downwards in 1993 for their album Ardor. Suzanne and I created the vocals, and I adapted a poem I wrote for the lyrics.”
The song’s emotional weight resonated strongly with listeners — not as pure despair, but as something more nuanced and internally resolving. Dark Angel fanzine captured this distinction with unusual precision:
“Quite possibly a reflection of my current nebulous melancholia,‘Depression Glass’ stands out again and again through each repeat play. The appropriate downward spiraling of its minor progression carries the listener along, but rather than burdening the ear with melodic despair, ‘Depression Glass’ aids in meliorating gloom into a non-combative internal calm.”
Writing in Permission — one of the largest gothic-industrial magazines of the 1990s — reviewer Chris Norris made the observation: “The emotional wrestling present in both the music of Lum and the vocals of Perry is captivating and can be evidenced just by looking at the titles alone: ‘Depression Glass,’ ‘Tear Love From My Mind.'”
The observation is perceptive, if slightly imprecise: both tracks originated outside the core duo — the former through Wilde’s lyrical contribution, the latter as a composition by Sam Rosenthal of Black Tape for a Blue Girl. That they nevertheless register as central to Ardor’s emotional landscape speaks to the strength of Lum’s production and the band’s ability to absorb outside material into a cohesive whole.
That capacity to absorb and transform outside contributions didn’t stop with “Depression Glass.” It extended, unexpectedly, into the session’s final and most uncanny product — one that nobody present had planned, and that Wilde herself didn’t realize was happening until it was already done.
During the same session, Wilde was improvising freely with the microphone and Lum’s looper pedal. As she recalled on her blog: “I was just fooling around with the microphone and the looper, and all of a sudden I noticed Ryan was recording. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Just keep going,’ he whispered.” She later added in a 2013 YouTube comment that she “didn’t realize he was recording until halfway through.” The result was a nearly six-minute soundscape built entirely from layered loops of Wilde’s and Lum’s voices.
Lum noted to Jon of Fond Affexxions that the track contained no guitars at all: “Even though there’s no guitars in ‘Sunset Bell’ I still approach it in the same way that I would even if it had guitars,” adding, “It’s technically not an instrumental, but I think of it as one because the vocals are just these big loops that sound like instruments.” Critics heard it the same way. Slut Cone, reviewing Ardor, grouped it naturally with the album’s purely instrumental passages: “Ardor also contains some stunning instrumentals: the compelling penultimate ‘Sunset Bell’ and the winter melancholy of ‘Mirrors A Still Sky.'” That a reviewer listening fresh made the same categorization Lum had arrived at in the studio suggests the effect was exactly what he intended — the voice so thoroughly dissolved into texture that the question of whether it counted as singing had become irrelevant.
For Lum, the track crystallized something he had been working toward across the entire album. In that same interview, he reflected: “Sometime last year I came up with some strange ideas I can’t put into words about texture and that’s kinda loosely, like, been my guiding force in making this album.” He acknowledged he hadn’t fully articulated it yet — “I’ll probably have this figured out in about a year and a half” — but the influence was already audible. Inspired by Seefeel’s experimental approach, he reflected: “I’ve been very into Seefeel. I think what they’ve done with loops will be influencing people for many years to come. Some songs on Ardor were probably influenced by them.” That fascination with vocal loops and layered texture would irrevocably shape the direction of Love Spirals Downwards’ next album, Ever.
Critical Reception and Support
Upon its release, Ardor was celebrated by critics for its lush soundscapes and emotional resonance. Carpe Noctem opened its review with an observation that set the tone for the album’s reception:
“It is not often that a band reaches cult status with only one album behind them. California’s ethereal duo of vocalist Suzanne Perry and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Lum achieved that feat in their debut Idylls, and have proven that it was no fluke with their sophomore effort Ardor, which beautifully details the very meaning of the word itself.”
B-Side Magazine matched that enthusiasm with characteristic romantic excess:
“Romance! Despair! Trauma! Suzanne Perry and Ryan Lum once again create a world without boundaries, taking in subtle sounds and sharp senses, morphing them into music and presenting them back for our listening pleasure. Seductive and sad, full of longing and lust… Like visiting ancient ruins on a sunny day, Ardor captures your imagination. My suggestion: surrender to them.”
Other critics responded with equal warmth:
- Pandemonium: “Their debut, Idylls, enchanted critics and audiences alike with haunting ethereal vocals and darkly swirling guitars, and Ardor is equally impressive. Ryan Lum weaves the textures and atmospheres above which Suzanne Perry’s vocals serenely float, wordlessly evoking a dreamy otherworld of bliss. This time, the aura’s slightly brighter, as if a single ray of sun has pierced Spiral’s darkness. There’s a bittersweet feel to Ardor, as the soothing vocals play against the melancholy music.”
- Dark Angel: “The second wave of aural resplendence from the lean duo of vocalist Suzanne Perry and guitar necromancer Ryan Lum far surpasses “Idylls” in its intensity of focus, and leans less toward their initially more Eastern echoes. Perry and Lum have obviously honed their skills for interpreting yet-undreamed of musical dreams. A signature Projekt artist, Love Spirals Downward abounds in quality pastoral bliss.”
- Music from the Empty Quarter: “Suzanne Perry’s heavenly vocals mix with a lushly produced backdrop of melody and ambience for fifty gorgeous minutes of sound. This is simply introspective, intelligent ‘pop’ (and I use the word reservedly) having more than a hint of sadness buried within it. Exquisite.”
- The Orange County Register: “Soaringly romantic and hauntingly brooding, Ardor practically celebrates an elegant brand of Euro-cool.”
- Alternative Press: “LSD stuns with the sort of music that once made the Twins so exciting. Droning, quivering layers of electric and acoustic guitars, minimal drums and just the right amount of synthetic keys as needed for texture. And the voice. There’s no need to bemoan the Twins. Their old banner has been picked up and held high by a pair who will not let it drop.”
Ardor’s Global Reach: Compilation Appearances
Although traditional singles were rare for Projekt releases in the early 1990s, Ardor’s tracks found their way to audiences through compilations, promotional cassettes, and sampler CDs — a strategy that reflected the label’s and band’s emphasis on albums over individual hits. Rather than elevating a single song as the album’s defining point, multiple tracks circulated across different channels, each highlighting a facet of Love Spirals Downwards’ evolving sound.
“Kykeon,” for instance, appeared in a remixed form on 50 Years of Sunshine (1993), a psychedelic-themed compilation released ahead of Ardor, providing early exposure for the band’s shifting sonic palette. Meanwhile, “Write in Water,” “Will You Fade,” and “Avicenna” all saw placement on prominent international samplers over the next several years, from Hyperium’s Heavenly Voices series to Caroline Records’ I Hear Ya! in the U.S., ensuring that listeners encountered Ardor’s textures from multiple entry points.
This distributed approach to exposure emphasized the album as a cohesive artistic statement, rather than singling out one track for promotion, and allowed the band’s nuanced instrumentation, layered guitars, and ethereal vocals to reach diverse international audiences in both the ethereal wave and dream pop communities.
| Year | Song | Compilation | Label |
| 1993 | “Kykeon” (Remix) | 50 Years of Sunshine | Silent |
| 1993 | “Kykeon” (Remix) | The Altered Mind #13 (Flexidisc) | The Altered Mind |
| 1993 | “Write in Water” | Beneath the Icy Floe | Projekt |
| 1994 | “Kykeon” (Demo) | Heavenly Voices Part 2 | Hyperium |
| 1995 | “Avicenna” | Zauber of Music Vol. II | Empty Quarter |
| 1995 | “Avicenna” | Beneath The Icy Floe (Sampler) | Hyperium |
| 1995 | “Avicenna” | Romantic Sound Sampler Vol. 2 | Zillo/EFA |
| 1995 | “Write in Water” | Heavenly Voices III | Hyperium |
| 1995 | “Will You Fade” | I Hear Ya! Spring 1995 | Caroline |
| 1996 | “Will You Fade” | Wave Romantics | Facedown/Edel |
| 1998 | “Will You Fade” | Romantic Sounds Dark | Zillo |
Even decades later, Ardor continued to earn recognition, with tracks included on retrospective collections such as Projekt 100: The Early Years, 1985 to 1995 (2000) and Projekt200 (2007), reaffirming the album’s significance within the Projekt Records catalog.
The Ardor Remastered Reissue (2007)
In 2007, Projekt celebrated the album’s enduring influence by releasing an expanded edition of Ardor, completely remastered by Ryan Lum to enhance its sonic clarity and further highlight its lasting legacy. This reissue was a co-release between Projekt Records (handling physical distribution) and Chillcuts—the label founded by Lum and his new partner, Anji Bee, after leaving Projekt—which handled the digital distribution of the remastered albums.
The primary catalyst for the 2007 reissue was the original album’s problematic sound quality, which had long been a source of frustration for Lum. He explained the technical issue during Chillin’ with Lovespirals episode 23 (October 3rd, 2006): “A little-known fact about Ardor: I mastered it with way too much bass. I just thought it sounded hip in the mastering studio. It was all kinda booming and it was exciting…. So then I got the DAT tape back, took it home and played it and said, ‘Holy crap, it sucks. It’s all muddy. You can’t hear the high end.'”
For the 2007 release, Lum was able to use the original DAT tapes to create the sound he originally intended: “The reissue of Ardor will have a new remastering… And it sounds the way I wanted it to sound: all nice and crisp. You can hear more guitars than ever before.”
Bee confirmed the dramatic improvement, stating, “The guitars sound great. It was like discovering the music all over again.“
As recounted in Chillin’ with Lovespirals episode 40 (September 7, 2007), the re-release was almost derailed by a missing piece of its history—the original cover photo. However, the original 8×10 photograph for the cover was found in a scrapbook just days before the artwork needed to be finalized. Lum and Bee were able to locate the photographer, Laura Crosta, after 15 years, securing the rights to the image, as she explained: “After months of not being able to get stuff together, in the last week everything fell into place like, ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’ Like fricken Tetris.”
In addition to the sonic and visual upgrades, the expanded edition included three bonus tracks:
- “Oisin and Niam”: An unreleased instrumental outtake from the recording Ardor sessions. Originally an untitled piece that sat in the archives for over a decade, it was finally discovered and christened by Lum’s creative partner, Anji Lum (née Bee), who drew the title from the Irish legend of the warrior-poet Oisín and the golden-haired Niamh. MusicTap noted it was “a brilliant instrumental song that makes me somewhat sad that it was not included on the original album… I’m quite happy to see its resurrection here, where it belongs.“
- “I Could Find It (Instrumental Mix)”: An instrumental mix of the album track, “I Could Find It Only by Chance,” also unearthed from Lum’s DAT archives.
- “Write in Water” (Live): A live performance at The Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA, 9/21/1995. While this is the same soundboard recording featured on the band’s later Live album, Lum’s production on this earlier release offers a distinct perspective on the performance.
Reviewers lauded the reissues, with Matthew Johnson of Re:Gen providing perhaps the most glowing assessment, headlining his review: “The legendary ethereal act’s best album, available again with bonus tracks.” He elaborated:
“Even if the rest of the album was substandard, Ardor would still be a near masterpiece thanks only to the presence of ‘Write in Water.’ Often copied but never quite surpassed, the song’s languid guitar strums, celestial effects washes, and gorgeously bittersweet vocals epitomize the very best of the ’90s ethereal scene… Delirious and beautiful, but never cloying or twee, Ardor is perhaps Love Spirals Downwards’ magnum opus.”
Justin Elswick of Sleep Thief, who would later collaborate with Suzanne Perry, spoke to the album’s profound and lasting power:
“I first heard LSD when I was a sophomore in college. Ardor instantly blew me away with its incredibly lush production and combination of washed guitars and gorgeous female vocals. I don’t think that a week has gone by in my life where I have NOT listened to this album, and it has been years. There is something ancient and haunted in this music.”
Other critics concurred, with Mike Schiller of Pop Matters noting:
“It’s Ardor that should really get the attention when examining this pair of albums. … Ardor is proof enough that they had plenty to offer, with moments on par with the best the genre has to offer.”
Distance, Refinement, Legacy
Ardor stands not only as Love Spirals Downwards’ most cohesive early statement but as a bridge: between ethereal wave and shoegaze, improvisation and intentional composition, emotional reticence and lyrical vulnerability. Over three decades later, its quietly radical experiments — from the backwards-forwards sorcery of “Sidhe” to the vocal soundscape of “Sunset Bell” — remain as vivid as the moment Lum pressed record in his modest home studio and let the sound lead wherever it wanted to go.
But the album’s unexpected commercial success had consequences the duo hadn’t anticipated. Projekt, emboldened by Ardor‘s reach and the growing “Heavenly Voices” phenomenon, was already laying the groundwork for a move that would pull the project out of the sanctuary of the studio and, for the first time, onto the stage.
NEXT CHAPTER: From Studio to Stage: Love Spirals Downwards Reluctant Leap Into Live Performance