SOUND SPIRALS UPWARDS

By Bryan Reeseman

“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 DOWN IS DECIDEDLY UNUSUAL

By Phillip H. Farber

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.”