Idylls, the debut album by Love Spirals Downwards, sits at the crossroads of early-1990s ethereal wave and the burgeoning sounds that would later be categorized as dream-pop—a realm where texture and atmosphere take precedence over traditional lyricism. Released in late 1992 on CD and cassette by Projekt Records in the U.S. and on CD by Hyperium Records in Germany, it arrived following the duo’s compilation debut on From Across This Gray Land No. 3. Those initial tracks, “Forgo” and “Mediterranea,” had introduced composer/producer Ryan Lum and vocalist Suzanne Perry to the ethereal scene and led directly to a full album offer from Projekt.
The album’s sound is built around Lum’s acoustic and electric guitar work and Perry’s glossolalia-adjacent vocalizations, a pairing that invites comparison to prominent touchstones in the broader ethereal/darkwave continuum. At the same time, the record was framed by its label in deliberately impressionistic terms — Projekt Records described Love Spirals Downwards as “the unconscious mind of ethereal music; evoking forgotten memories with subjective, alien tongues…“ — and early commentary similarly emphasized dream-states and half-remembered imagery rather than conventional song narratives.
Music From The Empty Quarter praised Idylls as:
“Thirteen angelic tracks tripping through peaceful illusions and fantasies, only briefly accessible in dream-soaked memories.”
A Sound Already in Motion
Though Idylls established Love Spirals Downwards as a duo in 1992, many of its sonic elements had been developing for years. Lum created music throughout the 1980s in private, approaching it more as a personal outlet than a professional endeavor. Reflecting on this period in a Fond Affexxions (1993), he said: “I had five plus years to mature in a songwriting and recording sense. By the time Suzanne came along, the music had evolved—I’m not saying it’s good, just evolved.”
Suzanne, looking back in Tear Down the Sky (1993), gave the simplest summary of his pre-duo era: “He would make music and record it and not send it anywhere. He was cocooning.” Lum didn’t disagree, noting that his early work was an emotional necessity rather than a career move. This period of solitary refinement meant that by the time they began collaborating in mid-1991, the musical foundation was already mature. As Lum told Noising Therapy (Winter 1992/93), some of the tracks that would eventually comprise Idylls actually dated back as far as 1989.
Lum clarified in Losing Today (1999) that the album was a hybrid of these different eras: “A lot of the songs I had started on years before, and a lot of the songs I finished the year it came out… it’s stuff I made between 1989 and 1992.” When asked if he had been in bands prior to Love Spirals Downwards, Lum shrugged, “Not really. Just goofin’ off stuff. Love Spirals wasn’t even really supposed to be a band. It just kinda happened.”
This inclusion of long-gestating tracks might suggest a collection of disparate demos, but the duo maintained a rigorous standard for what they released. In Tear Down the Sky (1993), Suzanne insisted, “Nearly everything we made has been put on the CD. We don’t make scratch songs,” a sentiment Lum echoed with characteristic bluntness: “I do make songs that suck, but we never work them past the early sucky stage.” This commitment to quality meant that even when a song was years old, it was only included on an album once it felt complete enough to include.
Once the Projekt connection was made, the shift from private work to public release happened quickly. “We did this more for fun than anything else… But, luckily, Projekt answered us positively,” Lum told Noising Therapy. After sending demo tapes in late 1991, the project quickly moved from an appearance on the From Across This Gray Land No. 3 compilation to an offer for their own full-length album.
Because the timeline accelerated so rapidly, completing and delivering Idylls required an intense creative push over a short period. A 1992 interview with Lum printed in Isolation (1993) captured that final stretch: “It seems to have been a very full time pursuit over the past summer. I have been putting a lot of work into finishing up the album; recording, mixing, getting artwork together, etc. But the album is coming along very nice. I am very pleased with all the songs and artwork so far.”
Years later, when asked whether he was satisfied with the result in Losing Today (1999), Lum was characteristically straightforward: “Considering the primitive and limited gear I had back then, yeah. Sam [Rosenthal, owner of Projekt Records] didn’t give us a budget or anything, I just finished it all on my gear.” He further clarified the financial reality of their independence: “I always do everything at my studio. I would spend like $100,000 —no, more than that— if I had to use a real studio.”
This sense of total autonomy was central to how the duo operated, dictating a creative methodology that stood in stark contrast to the traditional major label band landscape. As Lum explained in a KUCI (1998) radio interview, Love Spirals Downwards reversed the standard songwriting lifecycle entirely: “The way we work is kinda backwards. Most bands typically have a song first, then they go into the studio and record it. We’re the total opposite of that. We have no song first… a song just gets created, almost through chance accident and goofing around.”
In an interview with Ink Spots (1995), Lum provided the granular, step-by-step breakdown of how this accidental studio discovery actually translated into a finished track: “For the most part, I’ll always have the music almost done. Sometimes I won’t have the drums finished, or I might have a guitar part or two left, but the music’s done first. Once I have that done, I’ll bring it over to Suzanne and she’ll start humming and making up vocal parts. From there, we’ll start getting the words fitted into it, record that, then I mix the song down, and we’re done. It could take many months.”
Because the music emerged from this process of studio-based discovery rather than rehearsed composition, Lum’s role as sole engineer was built into the process. In a March 1998 KUCI broadcast, he confirmed his singular control over the recording process:
KUCI: So, have you worked alone or do you have someone that helps you?
Ryan Lum: I work alone. I mean, other than the people I record —like Suzanne’s voice and stuff— but I work alone.
KUCI: Wow, so you just…
Ryan Lum: I do everything.
KUCI: You produce and everything?
Ryan Lum: Oh, yeah, that’s the only way to do it.
This “backwards” approach helps explain how Idylls took shape. Much of the musical framework had been developed in isolation, with Lum handling the composition, instrumentation, recording, mixing, production, and, at times, vocal arrangement within the limits of his home setup. The result was a record assembled less through rehearsal than through recording itself — a process that also helps clarify the range of influences heard across the album.
A Tapestry of Influences: Ethereal, Psychedelic, and Beyond
Love Spirals Downwards emerged at a moment when acts such as Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins were helping to shape what listeners would come to recognize as ethereal music. Lum’s approach drew on that milieu, but also on a broader range of influences. As he explained in Isolation (1993), “I believe that all the different types of music that I have listened to throughout the years—such as ethereal, ambient, East Indian classical, psychedelic ’60s, and tribal percussive—have been blended into our eclectic sound.”
Lum’s intricate guitar textures suggest the influence of the Cocteau Twins’ shimmering soundscapes as well as 1960s psychedelia of bands like Jefferson Airplane and Popol Vuh, and they provide much of the album’s atmospheric framework. A review in Altered Mind (1993) described the result this way:
“The perfect pairing of Suzanne Perry’s ethereal siren vocal and Ryan Lum’s intricately crafted instrumentation. The sound is soothing, uplifting, and energizing all at once, and is marked by both delicacy and force.”
This meditative, transportive quality was shaped as much by Lum’s listening history as by the duo’s studio process. His tastes were particularly shaped in the mid-1980s, a time he identified as his favorite in Fond Affexxions (1993): “I remember discovering Cocteau Twins, when Love’s Easy Tears came out. I guess in like ’86 or ’87. and then going back and hearing Victorialand. 4AD was in its ‘Golden Age’ and everything was so magnificent. I started finding all the Harold Budd, Brian Eno stuff, Dead Can Dance, Cocteaus… Before that I liked some of The Cure stuff; their first three or four albums.”
Although Perry’s vocal style is often compared to Elizabeth Fraser or Lisa Gerrard, the duo also pointed to influences outside ethereal music. In the early 1990s, Lum took her to Indian classical performances at Occidental College, which the pair later cited among the musical experiences that informed their listening. Lum recalled in Altered Mind (1992), “We go to see the Indian concerts at Occidental College. We always try to look for really percussive bands, for lack of a better term, or ones that have really strange sounding string instruments, or ones that have nice vocals for her to listen to.”
That influence appears relevant to Perry’s use of improvisational syllables and phonetic abstraction on tracks such as “Scatter January,” “Forgo,” and especially on “Dead Language.” In their 1993 Fond Affexxions interview, Perry acknowledged incorporating “some Indian too, make-believe Indian” into her lyrics, suggesting that she was absorbing and reworking those influences in her own way. Projekt’s own description of the album, with its reference to an “Easternish atmosphere,” shows that this quality was part of the record’s presentation from the beginning.
Suzanne Perry and the Voice as Instrument
Suzanne Perry’s role in Love Spirals Downwards was shaped not by conventional song craft but by a fundamentally instrumental approach to the voice—one that emerged directly from the duo’s studio process rather than from any pre-existing lyrical practice.
In the letter accompanying their three-song demo submission to Projekt Records, the duo had already staked out the position plainly:
“In breaking with more conventional vocals, we completely abandon the use of language as a conveyor of thought and emotion in hopes that the entire musical piece, instrumental and vocals, work as one artistic expression.”
This was more than promotional language; it also reflected an articulated set of ideas about voice, meaning, and musical form. In Tear Down the Sky (1993), Lum described his academic focus as “the philosophy of language, the nature of reference, and meaning of words.” Because he was working through these questions in the classroom while also articulating a studio practice built around the abandonment of language, the phrasing of the demo letter takes on added precision. It suggests that ideas about language and reference were informing the way the duo thought about voice.
Those ideas also corresponded to a specific studio methodology. Rather than approaching a song as a lyricist, Perry approached it as a colorist. As she and Lum explained in an exchange with El Financiero (1995), the voice was never intended to sit “above” the arrangement, but to exist within it:
SUZANNE: For us, the voice is just another instrument, like the piano or guitar. Sometimes it’s used to carry melody, sometimes simply as an element of sound—another color within the music.
RYAN: We don’t see the voice as separate or above everything else. It’s not meant to dominate; it blends with the other instruments to create atmosphere and feeling.
This instrumental understanding of the voice also shaped their workflow. Perry described her studio-based method in a 1992 Altered Mind interview: “We manipulate the equipment, and then we don’t do it unless we’re in the studio. It’s really un-bandlike.” That word—”un-bandlike”—captures the essential logic of the process. Perry didn’t arrive at sessions with lyrics prepared; she arrived with instincts, and the studio was where those instincts took shape.
This approach also marked a rejection of the confessional mode common in much 1990s alternative songwriting, including the more personal, lyric-driven work associated with artists such as Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, and The Cranberries. On a 1994 official Projekt Ardor Interview cassette, Perry articulated her lyrical approach directly: “I think a lot of the lyrics are pretty meaningless. At least, in a direct sense. I’m using words, but I’m still not really conveying any definite meaning.” Lum reinforced this as a shared, principled stance in the same interview: “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.”
Perry elaborated further in another interview printed in Requiem Vol. 6 (1996), describing her deliberate approach to enunciation: “Even if I have lyrics, I don’t stress pronunciation at all. In vocal training, they stress that; to speak clearly, to sound out every word, and make sure you end each word you’re singing. I don’t like that.” The goal was not obscurity for its own sake but a different kind of clarity — one that bypasses language rather than deploying it. As Perry put it: she wanted “something that doesn’t have to have an attachment to language… a universal language that doesn’t get bogged down in meanings.”
That departure from confessional lyricism also shaped the way listeners could hear and interpret the songs. Lum described the effect in Dusk Memories (1994): “A friend recently transcribed what she thought were the lyrics of our new songs, and they were different from ours. But the interesting thing is that her lyrics were just different from ours, not better or worse. The way she had transmitted her meaning to the texts was really intriguing. That’s why I think it’s so exciting to use lyrics like ours: there’s not a single meaning that everyone is expected to understand. I bet there are as many different meanings for our songs as there are people that listen to them.”
Perry herself, however, introduced a small qualification. In a 1997 KUCI radio interview: “The lyrics in my songs have nothing to do with writers or poetry or stuff like that, except for stuff that subconsciously influences me.” The remark is brief, but it suggests that the duo’s stated resistance to fixed meaning was not necessarily absolute. Some degree of subconscious association still entered the work. A contemporary review in Dusk Memories captured the effect from the listener’s side: “Although the lyrics are not meant to be understood, they communicate emotions that go beyond the semantic message to touch the listener in depth.”
This balance between stated non-meaning and emotional suggestion helps clarify Perry’s approach on Idylls. Rather than approaching the studio with a collection of poetry, she immersed herself in Lum’s musical landscapes, allowing her vocals to emerge in response to the music. Projekt’s own description Idylls framed that effect in similarly impressionistic terms, noting her “ebbing, oceanic female vocals” as a sound that may “elude the threshold of perception and weave itself into the mind’s strata of buried experiences.”
Language, Sound, and Suggestion
With the duo’s founding principle in mind —that they would “completely abandon the use of language as a conveyor of thought and emotion”— the songs on Idylls can be approached less as texts to decode than as listening experiences, each one offering different footholds for personal meaning.
The opening track, “Illusory Me,” sets that tone immediately. As Music Tap observed in their 2007 reissue review, it begins with “echoed vocals layered over a soft bed of otherworldly melodies” — a description that neatly captures the track’s structure. Perry’s vocal opens on pure invented sound: “Fraoch shalais lae lar la rey ah.”
A handwritten draft dated September 2, 1991 — working title “Good Music” — shows the opening phrase annotated with vocal technique notes and multiple alternate variations, most of which didn’t survive to the final recording. What did survive is considerably stripped back: the verse moves from pure sound into English image-phrases threaded with non-lexical syllables — “Soar mirror through air / Reflect a se aisons / Carnelian autumn” — before the chorus resolves into the one fully legible phrase in the entire passage: “Illusory me.”
A review of the Idylls 2007 reissue by Music Tap credited Lum’s production specifically: “gorgeously sculpted sound imageries utilizing acoustic guitars, rhythmic bass and percussion, keyboards, and electric guitar, highlighted by the airy voice of Perry.” Lum himself singled the track out in Noising Therapy (Winter 1992/93), naming “Illusory Me” alongside “This Endris Night” as his personal favorites from the album.
“Scatter January,” the album’s second track, continues that exploration, with Perry opening in a slightly dissonant harmony that sounds almost like an intonation or chant: “Sah nay ay.” After that opening refrain, the vocals widen into the more ethereal harmonic style heard on “Mediterranea,” moving through similarly glossolalic phrases — “Fa la nay sansta / Vivela / Sah la shee tah / Day me aytra” — before circling back to the initial chant. A PopMatters review of Idylls 2007 reissue contextualized this approach more broadly, noting that Perry took a “plaintive approach to the Lisa Gerrard-esque habit of nonsense syllables mixed with the occasional intelligible lyric, coming off as ethereal, yet human.” Music Tap described the live version as “a softer, less effective version of the procession-like song” also points to what the studio recording preserves: a forward momentum and ceremonial weight that proved difficult to reproduce live.
The third track, “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” takes its title from Shakespeare’s early comedy, which oddly suits a track built almost entirely on invented syllables, where the labour of language has been abandoned in favor of pure vocal texture. The production is the most stripped-back on the album. Lum sets aside the drum machine in favor of a simple egg shaker, and the arrangement centers on acoustic guitar. Perry’s vocals — “Ki yay yo, lay yay yo / Ki yay yo, li yay yo / Li ya crea chaya / Li yo coutray ah” — are entirely non-lexical throughout, but when the harmonies enter they take on a distinctly medieval quality, less contemporary dream-pop than plainchant refracted through a home studio. The effect is intimate and slightly ancient at the same time.
“This Endris Night” adapts a traditional English carol surviving in 15th-century sources. Love Spirals Downwards’ setting strips away any ceremonial grandeur in favor of intimacy: Lum’s arrangement is minimal, Perry’s vocal quiet and layered. Perry’s treatment is not a straightforward rendition — the text dissolves largely into pure vocal texture — but certain phrases surface with enough clarity to anchor the listener to the source. “Lullay,” repeated throughout, is the most immediate signal: a word so embedded in the medieval carol tradition that it functions as genre marker as much as lyric. “I pray thee grant my wish” and “I may not sleep” emerge from the opening, and by the song’s close, return — “I pray thee grant / I may not sleep” — stripped further down, as though the meaning has been worn smooth by the song itself. It is less a performance of the carol than a dissolution of it.
Following the medieval echoes of ‘This Endris Night,’ ‘Forgo’ returns the album to the duo’s earliest recorded collaboration, providing an early example of the working process that shaped the rest of the record. The track is built upon a hypnotic, tribal foundation of Alesis HR-16 drum patterns, droning synths, and chiming guitar. Over this rhythmic bed, Perry utilizes a melismatic vocal approach that dissolves language into pure phonetic syllables—“Des cree day hay hay hay / Son coh lay hay hay hay”—treating the voice as a melodic and rhythmic element rather than a vessel for text. This versatility was noted by Opus in a 2009 Idylls review, which simultaneously compared her work to the Cocteau Twins’ vocalist, Elizabeth Fraser: “Perry’s voice proves surprisingly versatile, moving from Fraser’s angelic cooing to an almost Middle-Eastern tone (“Scatter January”, “Forgo”) that gives the music its own special feeling of exotica.” In that fusion of textures, the duo’s founding intent becomes especially clear: the music and the voice operate as a single, atmospheric expression.
Perry’s working notes for “Dead Language” offer a striking illustration of the Indian classical immersion already documented in the Tapestry of Influences section. Lum confirmed in Dusk Memories (1994) that the Indian music listening was specifically concentrated around the Idylls era: “There are Indian influences, at least in Idylls, because when I was working on the pieces included in the record I was listening to many records and going to many concerts of Indian music.”
This absorbed vocabulary surfaces in Perry’s phonetic syllables — “Va su de va / Su da ah ma / Vis nu in dra mu oo ni”— which loosely echo the cadence of Sanskrit devotional names such as Vasudeva and Vishnu. Because the phrases were written phonetically and broken into structural units — marking emphasis and vocal register — the question of intent remains nuanced. Perry herself later described the style simply as “make-believe Indian,” suggesting the sounds may have emerged more from immersion and intuition than from conscious linguistic reference.
“Stir About the Stars” is the album’s outlier — the one track where Perry’s vocals resolve into fully legible English, and the only lyric printed in the Idylls CD jacket: “I begin again / As the world outside ends / Dense, even in the still light / To owe you my life / I tell you / Make castles when you want to / And fill them with sights / Stir about the stars / During nights below these tides”
The exception did not go unnoticed. When Fond Affexxions writer Jon Gonzalez named it his favorite track on the album in the 1994 official Projekt Ardor Interview cassette — “not just because of the discernible lyric, but I thought it was a very pretty song” — Perry confirmed she had written the vocal parts herself, then immediately stepped back from the implication, saying of her voice: “I’d prefer to use it more as an instrument. I don’t see myself as a writer or a poet, and usually I’m very insecure about the things that I write.” Lum immediately reinforced the position: “We are not concerned with messages or poetry. I mean, that’s another art form entirely, and it doesn’t necessarily belong in music.”
“Ladonna Dissima” is perhaps the album’s most hypnotic exercise in pure sound construction. The lyrics — built entirely around permutations of “ladonna” and “dissima” — never resolve into meaning, but carry the phonetic suggestion of Italian: donna evokes “woman,” while dissima echoes an Italian superlative suffix. The overall effect is Mediterranean in feel without pointing to a specific linguistic source. Perry herself described this category of vocal writing on the 1994 official Projekt Ardor Interview cassette: “Some are in English and they make no sense. And there are others that are in a make-believe Italian. And then there’s kind of a make-believe Latin… and some French, too.” Lum interjected: “There’s no French words, they’re just gibberish! Just nonsense French words that sound nice.” Perry’s own summary was simpler: “So the key is what sounds nice.”
The track’s instrumental design is just as notable. Lum’s eBow guitar runs throughout, its sustained, bowed tone giving the arrangement an eerie, almost vocal quality of its own, before expanding into a full eBow solo near the track’s climax. When “Ladonna Dissima” was included on the retrospective Temporal, the review in Outburn (2000) noted its “tenebrous” quality as evidence of “how versatile and adventurous the duo is,” a later assessment that helps register qualities not often singled out in early reviews of Idylls.
Where “Ladonna Dissima” dissolves language into pure phonetic pleasure, “Drops, Rain and Sea” pulls in the other direction — Perry’s phrasing here suggests real words throughout — “Allured by me / Forsake said she / Adamantine / Drops, rain, and sea” — with the elevated diction of adamantine emerging as an unexpected note — a word suggesting something unyielding or diamond-hard. The recurring chorus opens with “Now with lowery wisdom / Nobility assured / Opulent sweetness” — “lowery” carrying its archaic sense of an overcast, threatening sky, threading the track’s water imagery through the harmonics as much as the words themselves.
“And the Wood Comes Into Leaf” closes Idylls on one of its most distinctive sonic notes with layered, shimmering guitars, lush reverb, and Perry’s voice treated as texture as much as melody — but refracted through a distinctly medieval lens. The arrangement builds patiently from a delicate, almost suspended opening before the drum machine enters at the midpoint, shifting the track from something intimate and ancient into something more expansive and driving.
Perry described the lyrics in Fond Affexxions (1993) as drawn from an anonymous Old or Middle English poem, though the text is more precisely a collage of medieval sources held together by a unifying mood. Fragments from Now Go’th Sun Under Wode (“goeth sun under tre“), Summer Is Icumen In (“springeth sing, murie sing“), and Where Beth They Biforen Us Weren (“wherebeth they beforen us weren“) surface and dissolve across the lyric, each carrying its original meditation on nature, transience, and longing. As a closing track, it leaves Idylls not with resolution but with recurrence, the wood perpetually coming into leaf.
Instrumental Meditations
Three tracks on Idylls step back from Perry’s voice almost entirely. The titles of two of them signal Lum’s academic preoccupations directly: “Eudaimonia” draws on Aristotle’s concept of human flourishing and contentment, while “Noumena of Spirit” reaches toward Kant’s term for the thing-in-itself — reality as it exists beyond perception. That Lum was a full-time philosophy student while finishing the album lends these choices a quiet coherence: the vocabulary wasn’t decorative, it was simply the one he was living with.
“Noumena of Spirit” is the closest of the three to a vocal track — Perry layers in wordless “ahh” syllables as texture rather than melody, submerged inside the dense atmosphere. Opus described the effect in 2009 as “a state of complete bliss-out in which she’s more than content to drift along to wherever Lum’s guitar work might lead” — a characterization that applies equally to the listener.
“Eudaimonia” and “Waiting for Sunrise” are purely instrumental. Both pieces expand the atmospheric guitar techniques heard elsewhere on the album, including Lum’s use of the eBow — the handheld electromagnetic device that sustains guitar strings indefinitely, allowing them to behave more like bowed instruments than plucked ones. The result is a slow-moving harmonic wash in which notes bloom and hover rather than resolve.
Opus noted: “‘Eudaimonia’ and ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ are explorations in guitar ambience, especially the latter, which eschews any sort of percussion or any similar ‘earthly’ element for a golden sound that’s truly fitting given its title.” The same review credited Lum’s guitar work specifically, observing that he “may be certainly indebted to Guthrie, but he’s certainly no sycophant.”
“Waiting for Sunrise” in particular connects to something Lum had described in Altered Mind (1992): “Do you know Moonwash Symphony? I’m friends with them, and a year or two ago I used to do strange opening act things for them. One time me and my friend did a weird electronic sustained reverb jam.” That sustained reverb sensibility — texture over structure, atmosphere over progression — found its most refined expression here.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Contemporary reviews reflected that reception across a range of publications:
Alternative Press: “Love Spirals Downwards are one of a growing number of acts that defy the loudness and harshness that have defined recent contemporary music… Their sound is a “70/30 Cocteau/Dead Can Dance weave“… Perry’s voice is a “very powerful presence, merging strength with delicacy much like Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard.”
Ray Gun Magazine: “Idylls swims on waves of guitar and airy, otherworldly vocals.”
Mute Magazine: “It all flows together like a dream of some long, sun-drenched afternoon with a cool breeze now and then wafting through.”
Industrial Nation: “Like a cloud-ride to a heaven via angelic voices and delicate music.” Also noted the album’s “soft, barely distinguishable lyrics and daydreaming melodies” and highlighted “Dead Language” and “Stir About the Stars” as “promising tracks.”
B-SIDE MAGAZINE: “Swirling, swaying, layers of atmospheric music and female vocals… Idylls is almost ambient at times, wandering about in your head like an echo of the sad past.”
Industrial Gear: “Love Spirals Downwards makes beautifully ethereal music… With the angelic vocals of Suzanne Perry perfectly complementing the dreamy, low key music… The middle eastern feel of the guitars and percussion keeps these songs interesting.”
Dusk Memories: “55 minutes of magical, bewitching, mind-expanding music… Ryan intertwines acoustic and electric guitar spirals that run after each other and Suzanne weaves her seductive vocal embroideries on this hypnotic carpet of sounds.”
Music From The Empty Quarter: “Sumptuous acoustics, beautiful female voice, and sweet harmony rising to glorious heights.”
Permission Magazine: “Idylls is a brilliant album.”
Decades later, Idylls remains a landmark release, described by Pop Matters in 2008 as: “More akin to the lighter side of such darkwave stalwarts as Cocteau Twins, Love Is Colder than Death, and Projekt labelmate Black Tape for a Blue Girl.”
The critical acclaim Idylls received upon its release was further amplified by the inclusion of its tracks on various influential compilations, which helped introduce Love Spirals Downwards to a wider audience within the ethereal and dream-pop scene.
Expanding Reach: Compilation Placements
During its promotional cycle, songs from Idylls appeared on several compilations through Projekt and Hyperium, introducing the duo to audiences across the U.S. and Europe:
- Hyperium Promo-Sampler (Hyperium, 1992) “Scatter January”
- From Hypnotic to Hypersonic (Hyperium, 1992) “Noumena”
- Heavenly Voices Part 1 (Hyperium, 1993) “Love’s Labour’s Lost (Remix)”
- Beneath the Icy Floe Vol. 2 (Projekt, 1994) “Ladonna Dissima”
- Beneath the Icy Floe – Projekt Record’s Sampler (Hyperium, 1995) “This Endris Night”
These early appearances on samplers and compilations from Projekt and Hyperium Records helped establish Idylls as a cornerstone of the ethereal wave genre, drawing in fans of dream-pop, ambient, and gothic music alike.
Years after its release, Idylls continued to appear on retrospective compilations, reflecting its staying power within the genre:
- Darkwave: Music of the Shadows v2 (K-Tel, 2000) “Forgo”
- Within This Infinite Ocean (Projekt/Borders, 2001) “This Endris Night”
- Projekt: The New Face of Goth (Projekt Records/Hot Topic, 2003) “This Endris Night”
- Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986–1995 (Cherry Red, 2023) “Stir About the Stars”
The 2023 Cherry Red inclusion — thirty years after the album’s release, on a label-agnostic survey of the era — is perhaps the most telling measure of Idylls‘ standing: not a catalog curiosity but a record that still reads as representative of its moment.
In 2007, Projekt Records marked the album’s enduring presence with a remastered reissue, expanded with three bonus tracks and remastered by Lum himself — a release covered in the following section.
Remastered Reissue with Bonus Tracks
The 2007 gatefold CD reissue of Idylls by Projekt Records contains three additional tracks that offer a deeper glimpse into the band’s formative years.
“Mediterranea” was one of the three songs included on the demo tape the duo submitted to Projekt for consideration. It first appeared in 1992 on the label’s compilation From Across This Gray Land No. 3, alongside “Forgo.” Markedly different in style from much of Idylls, “Mediterranea” reflects the duo’s earlier 4AD-influenced sound and Perry’s glossolalic vocal approach.
The track made a strong impression on at least some early listeners. It’s effect was recalled by The Ninth Wave (1995):
“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 reason this song wasn’t initially included on Idylls was as practical one, as explained by Lum in Noising Therapy (Winter 1992/93): “One of Sam’s requirements for the sampler From Across This Gray Land 3 was that we make it an unreleased title. We chose ‘Mediterranea'”
Another notable addition is the “Heavenly Voices Mix” of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” an extended version clocking in at four minutes and twenty seconds — nearly two minutes longer than the original album version. While Idylls fades out at a mere two and a half minutes with the faint echo of Perry’s final “ki yay yo” lingering, this extended version features a mournful e-bow guitar solo and beautifully layered vocal harmonies.
The track was first featured on Heavenly Voices, the 1993 inaugural compilation from Germany’s Hyperium Records. Released as a limited-edition box set of 1000 copies with elaborate artwork and inserts, the 2-CD collection introduced listeners to the label’s signature aesthetic. Hyperium founder Oli Rösch coined the term “Heavenly Voices” to describe female-fronted bands across genres such as ethereal, neo-folk, neo-classical, avant-garde, goth rock, and industrial. Love Spirals Downwards’ inclusion alongside acts like Chandeen and Bel Canto further solidified their standing within the ethereal wave scene. Interestingly, the extended mix was not labeled as a special version on the compilation but has since been officially recognized as “Love’s Labour’s Lost (Heavenly Voices Mix)” on the Idylls reissue.
Finally, the reissue includes a rare live recording of “Scatter January” from the band’s performance on the Echoes Living Room Concert series. The intimate, stripped-down recording offers a glimpse into Love Spirals Downwards’ sound in a live setting. While the duo did not tour to promote Idylls, this performance — recorded after their sophomore album — serves as a snapshot of how they brought their layered studio compositions to life on stage.
These bonus tracks add richness to the Idylls experience, allowing listeners to trace the duo’s sonic evolution from early demos to live renditions, while celebrating their enduring contributions to the ethereal wave genre.
A Thread Left Loose
Idylls arrived fully formed for a debut — not because Love Spirals Downwards were a young band hitting their stride, but because the record was the culmination of years of private work that the listener only encounters at its endpoint. That convergence of Lum’s long compositional apprenticeship and Perry’s instinctive vocal approach, captured in a home studio on modest gear, is what gives the album its unusual combination of intimacy and polish.
The finished album was received warmly, but the two creators needed time to catch up to it. “After working on it as long as we did, you really don’t want to hear it anymore,” Perry admitted in Fond Affexxions (1993). “Every time we finished a song, I thought, ‘God, what an awful song. Let’s not use that one.‘ In retrospect, after that’s worn off, we like it. I like it better now.” Lum’s assessment was more measured, and characteristically production-focused: “After the CD came out, I started liking it more. Even when I finished mixing it, it pretty much came out like I wanted it to. It wasn’t a disaster or anything.”
Not every thread from this period was fully resolved on Idylls. Some carried forward — quietly, without announcement — into what came next.
NEXT CHAPTER: “Kykeon” on 50 Years of Sunshine: Naming, Framing, and L.S.D.
PRIOR CHAPTER: Architect of Atmosphere: The Genesis of Love Spirals Downwards