Biography
Between 1992 and 1998, musician, Ryan Lum and vocalist, Suzanne Perry, released 4 best-selling Projekt albums under the name Love Spirals Downwards, with a unique blend of ethereal, shoegazer, folk, world, ambient, and electronica styles.
Dissatisfied with current trends and styles in much of today’s pop music, our music is a unique blend of what we find to be aesthetically pleasing. To us, our music transcends any one pigeonhole categorization into one particular style or genre. Elements from East Indian music, psychedelic rock, and ethereal – among others – can be found in our music. In creating atmosphere, we meld “exotically” tuned and processed acoustic, as well as electric, guitars with female vocals and percussion. 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.
— Love Spirals Downwards, 1991
The duo’s 1992 debut release, ‘Idylls,’ melded the 80’s 4AD band sound with 60’s psychedelic folk and international music to create a style all their own.
‘Ardor,’ released in 1994, aligned LSD with the shoegazer sound, utilizing the signature swirling guitars, minimal basslines and slow paced tempos of the genre. Perry’s glossolalia style vocal harmonies, however, set them apart from many of their contemporaries.
LSD’s 1996 release, ‘Ever,’ further diversified their established sound, bringing ambient electronic grooves into the mix of 60’s inspired folk melodies and lush guitar textures and incorporated more loops and fewer vocals than before.
Their best-selling fourth album, ‘Flux,’ made a bold move in a new direction incorporating ethereal drum and bass production and placing more emphasis on rhythm and beat than vocal fronting. ‘Flux’ brought the band, which now included sister, Kristen Perry on vocals, closer to a pop sound than previous efforts.
‘Temporal,’ their final release on Projekt Records, is a retrospective collection which follows a reverse continuum from post-’Flux’ drum ‘n’ bass dance remixes backwards in time to material from their very first released song, “Mediterranea,” from the ‘Across This Gray Land No. 3’ compilation. About half electronically oriented, and half acoustic based, ‘Temporal’ illustrates how the Love Spirals' sound grew over the years and changed with the times.
In 2014, a collection of archival live recordings was released digitally, simply called, “Live.” 2017 brought the expanded digital release of the long out-of-print CD single, ‘Sideways Forest,’ from 1996.
