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.”
On record, he uses some additional tunings. “’Sideways Forest’ is in a weird tuning [E B E A B E, with a capo at the second fret] which I learned from seeing the set list of a Red House Painters show on the Internet.” Lum says. “I saw one that looked interesting and I tried it, and that’s how ‘Sideways Forest’ came about.”
While they have an electronically enhanced sound on record, Lum and Perry prefer a stripped-down, acoustic guitar and vox approach in concert, in part because they want to show audiences that they can play without the effects. “It surprised a lot of people,” Lum says of their recent live tour. “They think we’re one of those bands that just turns the reverb up to 11 because we don’t know what we’re doing. They see us live, and there’s no drum kit to hide behind, there’s very little effects to hide behind. It’s just voice and guitar. If you can’t play, if you can’t sing, it’s really obvious really quickly.”
Even so, Lum adds, “We’re not a big musicianship kind of band. It’s important, but we’re not Yes or something like that. We play what we gotta play to make the music sound right. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s a little difficult. The most important thing is that we play it right.” Play it right they do. Love Spirals Downwards recently played to 950 people at the Proiekt Festival in Chicago and before a 1,600-person throng in Mexico City, and in both instances they entranced audiences with their pretty, enigmatic music.