DAVYD: Were you together as a band previous to being in the area?

SUZANNE: I guess in ’91 we started? Well, I’ve always been singing and he’s been doing music for a really long time. We actually were going out before we started doing music together. I had never done music with anyone before. We did a few songs together then trashed those 2 or 3 songs because we didn’t think they were too good, did a few more and put them on a demo tape and sent them off. At that time we were calling ourselves The Flower People as a joke.

DAVYD: Did any of the songs you were working on then make it on your CD?

RYAN: Our song “Forgo” is on our album and that’s one of those songs, “Dead Language” is also on our album. We also have a couple songs on Projekt compilations.

SUZANNE: That’s pretty much how we started, I was just basically fooling around. He had a lot of instrumental stuff and I just started humming on it and it worked.

I received Idylls in the mail from Projekt and put it in my CD player… After commenting on it being better than anything the Cocteau Twins have done since Lullabies, a friend angrily takes it out. But it’s true. The intensity quickly lost by the ‘C-word’ is present ten-fold here… LSD have released a CD on the increasingly amazing Projekt label, entitled Idylls, in addition to a contribution to the Fifty Years of Sunshine comp. and a flexi from Altered Mind, an LA based ‘zine. Upcoming plans include a track on the Black Tape cover CD and a second CD. All can be acquired by writing Projekt: Darkwave… Luckily I used my summer’s journey across this “Grey Land” of ours (pun intended) as an opportunity to meet with friends old and new and spent a wonderful afternoon with Ryan and Suzanne of Love Spirals Downwards… Here are some extractions from our very informal interview…

r = Ryan s = Suzanne m = me

We’ll skip the babble about early Ministry…

r: I’m mad. I just realized we’re going to miss Taco Bell tonight.

m: A friend of mine asked me where I wanted to eat lunch today and , of course, I said that I had to eat at Taco Bell. It’s the fast food chain of choice for both of us. The Projekt crew are down with Taco Bell.

r: We used to have a thing for Subway earlier in the year. The Veggies and Cheese six inch is $1.99 and when the Cold Cut Combo goes on sale it’s $1.49, so when I was living in Santa Barbara I would buy the Cold Cut Combo because it was 50 cents cheaper and I’d go out and find a homeless person and give the meat to them. So look at this, I’m saving money and I’m happy, and I’m giving food to a homeless person.

IDYLLS:

Fond Affexxions: This CD of yours. Idylls  was your first recorded piece, and I was very impressed. As far as how it came out… Were you happy with it? Did it come out as you intended? 

Suzanne Perry: After working on it as long as we did, you really don’t want to hear it anymore (Laughter), so think we stopped listening to it for a couple of months. Then when we started listening to it again, it came out better than we thought it did. I mean, 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. 

Ryan Lum: After the CD came out (a couple months later ahead), 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. 

Suzanne Perry: We didn’t have a DAT machine before, so we had to mix it all at once. 

Fond Affexxions: You mixed it all and then bumped it to DAT? 

Ryan Lum: No, no… over about three weeks we mixed it down… I guess that’s a long time. I was kinda nervous having it for three weeks!(Laughter)