All posts by ryan

Recent news

Our CD-single, Sideways Forest, will be released on August 1, 1996, and the new full-length album will follow on September 15.

Sean from Eden will be staying with us here for the next two weeks and we will be collaborating together in our studio to see what happens (maybe there’ll be an EP sometime in the future?). Plus, I think he will really dig Disneyland and seeing Jim Morrison’s house in Venice Beach. I would also like to say thanks to everyone who said hello to us at the recent Projekt Fest in Chicago.

And, check the Projekt News for more info on our two upcoming shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Chicago Tribune ProjektFest Piece

Cool. The Chicago Tribune published a story promoting the upcoming Projekt Festival happening at the Vic Theatre.

Psst! Projekt label’s going live with it’s dark sound

by Achy Obejas for “After Hours”

Step aside, Ajax and Minty Fresh. Make some room.

This Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Chicago experiences “From Across this Gray Land,” the first festival celebrating artists on the Projekt label.

The what?

It seems that while our town has been aggressively slamming and bumping to a cavalcade of local label bands at Lounge Ax and the Double Door, Sam Rosenthal and his Projekt artists quietly stole into town and set up shop.

And quietly is the operative word here.

Projekt artists — including Rosenthal’s group, Black Tape for a Blue Girl — are deeply immersed in something that could only be called dark music: ambient, gothic and ethereal. It’s lush, dense and often gloomy. Unlike most trendy ambient music, Projekt’s ambient records feature vocals; there is virtually nothing to dance to; it swirls and envelopes with an unabashed romanticism. Compared with most of the noise in town, Projekt practically whispers.

Rosenthal, 30, started Projekt back in 1983 but it didn’t get moving until three years later, when he moved to California from his native Ft. Lauderdale. Feeling alienated and depressed, he recorded “The Rope,” which he describes as “a combo of techno pop and ambient, somewhere between Gary Neuman and Eno.”

“The Rope” was promptly strangled by the critics, although Rosenthal developed a small core of followers. “At the time, it really upset me,” he confesses. “Now I just kind of laugh. Now I realize a lot of pseudo-intellectual rock critics don’t want to deal with what they think is sappy romantic crap.”

So Rosenthal persevered: With Black Tape for a Blue Girl, he released “Mesmerized by the Sirens” in 1987, “Ashes in the Brittle Air” in 1989, “Chaos of Desire” in 1993, “This Lush Garden Within” in 1994; this year has produced “Remnants of a Deeper Purity.”

But is anyone buying this except Rosenthal and his mother?

Rosenthal laughs again. “We sell all around the world,” he explains. “We sell in Asia and Europe. We’re in Borders.”

Projekt’s best-selling band, Love Spirals Downward, sells about 10,000 CDs per release. Black Tape for a Blue Girl sells about 9,000. Located near Chinatown, Projekt is Rosenthal’s full-time job and obsession. The label employs eight people.

The Projekt Festival, the first of its kind for the label, will feature a buffet of bands, but Rosenthal’s honest about how scary it is for him.

“We’ve got fans coming from Hong Kong and England,” he says. “It just seemed like a good thing to do, to meet the people who like the music. But Black Tape has been a studio band for 10 years. It’s never been possible to play live — so we’ve never done it before.”

Upcoming release and performance

This is Ryan again with a little update of what’s going on with us. Our first new music to be released in over a year and a half will be the cd-single Sideways Forest. It is a three songs disc: “Sideways Forest” (the mix that will be on our new album), a trippy groovy remix/re-worked mix of “Sideways Forest” and “Amarillo” — which will not be on the new album. This is set to come out in late June or early July. Our new full length album (still not titled) will follow in September.

We are looking forward to our next live performance at the Projekt Festival at which we’ll be playing two or three new songs in our still all-acoustic set. This will be our first show in Chicago, which was skipped between our West Coast and East Coast tours last year. It should be a lot of fun and please come see us (along with Lycia, lovesliescrushing, and Thanatos on our night) if you are from the area, since we have no plans to be playing there again anytime soon.

Also, if anybody read the Projekt news on the Projekt web, Sam commented on how he thought I wanted to move to Mexico City, as a few people have asked me about. No, I do not want to move there (and no, we were not treated like big rock stars as Sam described). I did say to him that I would like to make more visits there, in the spirit of my Beat heroes like Kerouac, which I plan to do this summer after the Chicago show for a few weeks and visit friends and eat non-stop.

Hello!

Hello. This is Ryan of Love Spirals Downwards. This is the first band info message from us on our webpage. I plan to update this every 2 or 3 months, or whenever there’s new information.

We’ve had lots of things happening with us lately including a show in Mexico City at the very beautiful Museo Universitario del Chopo on February 29. We spent a wonderful week in Mexico making many new friends and seeing some truly fantastic sights such as the pyramids at Teotihuacan (we climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun), as well as eating some of the best food in our lives.

We haven’t even begun to think about new tours yet but some shows may happen later this year. One upcoming scheduled performance is the Projekt Festival in Chicago. It is a two-evening event that will include nearly all of Projekt’s current recording line-up. We will supposedly be closing the first night on June 25. For more information on this call the Projekt info-line at (312) 491-0108.

Mean Street Vol. 8, #4 (1996)

Article by Ned Ragget

For Ryan Lum, instrumentalist for the L.A.based duo, Love Spirals Downwards, sticking t just one means of musical expression is not an option.

“I go between making this pure acoustic music and then going into this analog synthesizer, drum machine sound, tweaking knobs and stuff — just to keep things fun! If I did the same thing for a while, I’d get burnt out!”

Combined with the truly beautiful vocals of Suzanne Perry, Lum’s work in Love Spirals Downwards is a lush, wondrous experience. The band’s third album, Ever, has just been released on Projekt, and clearly demonstrates that Lum and Perry have moved from being simply fine disciples of the Cocteau Twins school of performance to becoming distinctly intriguing artists in their own right.

For Lum, the question of influence is a tricky one, reflecting the tension between inspiration and the need to be one’s own person.

“It’s hard to say which bands listen to are my influences and which are not. I guess everything I listen to somehow gets mixed up in what I do. That’s a tough question, because I don’t know what I’m trying to get away from, or what I’m trying to be like.”

On Ever, Lum found new ways of creating songs (reflected especially well in the new single “Sideways Forest,” in both its original and stripped-down, pulsing remix) which helped flesh out the album in different, intriguing ways, as opposed to the usual practice where he would give Perry a full song track to compose lyrics for and to sing over.

“Usually everything would be completed by that point, all the guitars and basic drum patterns. This album, I found that it was interesting to not have everything down, to just have the basic tracks for Suzanne to sing on, and then afterward I’d add different, new guitar parts that her vocals inspired me to do. It’s a little more interaction than me saying, ‘Here, here’s a song, sing on it and let me finish it.'”

For such a studio-based band –as Lum notes elsewhere, he was creating home tapes four years before Love Spirals Downwards released a record, while careful, full production marks all three releases so far—it might seem that live performances would be something hard to carry off.

Yet the band have played a number of shows over time, which Lum sees as a distinctively different way of looking at the duo’s work.

“For other bands, it might be natural to play live and try and record that later. For me, I record and then later I think, ‘Well, if we are going to play this live, how are we going to do it?’ There’s many different ways we could have gone about it, and the way I chose is essentially the two of us. We don’t have any backing tapes, sequencers or keyboards; we just have Suzanne singing and me playing acoustic guitar. Occasionally she’ll play a little tambourine.

I’ve learned, after playing a few shows, that live is about getting this kind of energy going or magic power happening! One thing that surprised me was that I didn’t know how possible that would be with just our stripped-down live sound. We thought we might need drums or all this other stuff. I’ve found that our acoustic sets are much better than they’d be with everything else!”

Though the band don’t play tours per se, having played at most three separate shows at any one jaunt, Love Spirals Downwards have played its share of one-off shows over time, with one of the most interesting, according to Lum, located in Mexico City — not least because it showed that the band’s fan base isn’t just a goth thing.

“The Mexico City show was typical of our kind of audience, with a mish-mash of different kinds of people. We tend to attract an extremely diverse crowd. There were goths there, but there were any other kind of fill-in-the-blank kind there as well? It was our biggest show, and that was weird! We’d never played to that many people before. Pertormance-wise, we were doing pretty bad that night! But they were energetic, and we fed off that; it made our evening go a little better!”

What’s next? With a few more one-off shows planned in the spring, Lum has already begun recording again, though there’s nothing specific on the horizon: “I don’t have this big scheme or plan; I may stop soon, or I may go for another ten years!”

Interview in Black Moon

Love Spirals Downwards is Ryan Lum and Suzanne Perry. They are one of the bands in the line up at the Projekt Festival. They will be hitting the ethereal air waves with their unique guitar and keyboards. This is one of the bands that I can’t wait to see at the festival. – Lou

Interview by Armand Rosamilia

BLACK MOON: How is your relationship with Projekt Records and Sam Rosenthal?

RL: It’s been pretty good. We get along good.

SP: I think they’re good to us. The royalties are really good. They do a good job of promotion. We’ve been able to be friends with them too.

RL: As opposed to purely business associates.

SP: Obviously, some things are all business. They don’t just think about sales.

RL: Given that fact of life, Projekt is good to us.

SP: They’re artists too.

Continue reading Interview in Black Moon

THE NATIONAL, Thurs, February 29, 1996


Music for the end of the millennium

By XAVIER QUIRARTE

Suzanne Perry and Ryan Lum are in music first and foremost for the pleasure of creating sounds, for the freedom to taste their art without any kind of commitment. Love Spirals Downwards, a joint project that began in the early nineties, has crystallized to date on two albums, Idylls and Ardor, published by the independent American company Projekt.

There have been some of the adjectives that his work has deserved:  “Millennium”, “Angelical.”

Continue reading THE NATIONAL, Thurs, February 29, 1996

The News, Vol XLVI NO. 232, Feb 29. 1996

U.S. Avante Garde Duo To Play D.F.

By Jose Fernandez Ramos, The News Staff Reporter

Love Spirals Downwards is one of those alternative bands whose music tends to attract a cult following.

What has happened to this Los Angeles duo, featuring Suzanne Perry (vocals) and Ryan Lum (guitars, electronics), is interesting and sometimes funny.

“One time a magazine requested an interview thinking that we would have a lot to say about LSD, because of the band’s name.” Perry says. “When they found out we have never tried it they lost interest.”

Although many fans attribute the duo’s music with spiritual, mystic and even healing powers, and critics have labelled their work with adjectives as diverse as “dark ethereal,” “gothic,””dream pop,” “angelic,” “Avant Garde,” “ambient,” etc., this young duo put things very simply.

“We just compose music without any specific intention,”Lum says.

The couple talked to The News Wednesday at Museo del Chopo, the gothic museum where the band’s only show in Mexico will take place Thursday.

“We don’t consider ourselves typical musicians, so we don’t think and act as typical musicians.” Perry says. “Many people think music is something more than music, like money, fame, clubs, the industry. But we just like what we do, the way we do it.” 

Love Spirals Downwards will share the space with Mexican duo La Divina Comedia (also a couple), which produces music very much in Spirals’ style.

The staples of the duo’s music are guitar lines distorted through electronic equipment for effects that often sound more like a synthesizer or keyboard. This surreol audio backdrop is complimented by Perry’s extraordinary soprano voice which has been honed to a finely funed instrument. However there is enough freedom and space for experimentation. 

“We try to add new elements, sounds, and instruments every time,” Lum says.

With two succesful albums out — ”Idylls”(1992) and “Ardor” (1995)– through Projekt Records, and pieces on several compilation albums, the band is already working on the recording of a third work. Some of those new compositions will be premiered at the concert. 

With its towering spires and stained glass, the Museo Del El Chopo seems a perfect atmosphere for such a performance. 

“This is such a beautiful place, it makes me want to sing here by myself at night. I hope the birds sing here at night as well,” Perry said. 

Music videos of similar vanguard styles will be shown before the live performance, and special stage and lighting designs will also form a part of the event, according to organizers.

 “This is a cultural and aethetic event more than a show business thing,” organizer Arturo Saucedo said, “This is not money making or party time. We want to create a movement and an audience for this kind of show.”

Love Spirals Downwards know that they can become as big as any commercial mainstream band, “if we change our style,” they say. But they are not interested, claiming “we don’t do it for the money.” Their recording studio is at home, in the bedroom, where most of the composition also takes place.

Outside of a cult fan movement, irrespective of the labels placed on it, the music of Love Spirals Downwards is worth listening.

Band news

We’ve had lots of things happening lately including a couple of shows in Mexico City and Guadalajara. And there is a new, still untitled, album that we are almost finished recording and mixing. It should have 10 new tracks and we hope to have it released in May or June depending on how soon we finish, as well as other record label factors. Also, we will most likely be contributing new songs to Hyperium Records’ upcoming compilations Heavenly Voices 4 and Heavenly Grooves.

We haven’t even begun to think about new tours yet, but some shows may happen later this year. One show that we are scheduled to perform is at the Projekt Records festival in Chicago. It is a two evening event that will include nearly all of Projekt’s current recording line-up. We will be closing the first night on June 25.

For more information on this, call the Projekt info-line at (312) 491-0108 or check out http://charlotte.acns.nwu.edu/arielr/projekt on the internet (the current site, but soon to be moving Projekt web site).

(taken from the band’s official mail list)

News Update

Sorry it’s been awhile since our last update. We’ve been very busy with many different things, one of which was our short ‘tour’. After a show in Seattle last Spring, we did a 3-show tour in August and September of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, followed by a show in Los Angeles. Many thanks to Pat Ogle at Projekt for making that happen! Being a studio-band and not having played live before, much to our surprise we had a great time doing these shows. It was especially nice to be able to meet some of you who write us! We hope to do more next year. And, we are tentatively set for doing one last show this year in Los Angeles again at the Troubadour on December 16.

Also, we are in the middle of recording and mixing a new album (still untitled), which will hopefully be released in the Spring of ’96 depending on when we finish. In the meantime, we released a new track, a cover of ‘Welcome Christmas from Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. on the new Projekt holiday CD called Excelsis.

‘Excelsis: A dark noel’ various artist compilation on Projekt Records

I also wanted to let you know that there’s a decent mailing list called ‘4AD-L’. In addition to bands on its namesake 4AD, other related music such as ourselves and a few other Projekt artists are often discussed and reviewed. To subscribe, send email to 4ad-l@listserv.american.edu, and type “subscribe 4AD-L” . We will try to post new information regarding our shows and releases in their News section.

(taken from the band’s official mail list)