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.
DAVYD: How was the sound compared to the recording for the al-bum, was it similar?
RYAN: Pretty much the same, we didn’t re-record it, we touched up parts here and there but it’s pretty much the same.
SUZANNE: The album, I think, sounds pretty diverse. It jumps around a lot from many different sounds. Our new album sounds really different from that
RYAN: Yeah, our first album is really schizophrenic but it all flows together from side to side. It’s really different from our new one.
DAVYD: When is that due?
RYAN: Projekt says September (94).
SUZANNE: It’s been a long time, we released that first one November of ’92. We’ve been doing so much other stuff. I’m in a Masters program and I’m doing my thesis and he’s been doing a Ph.D. in a Philosophy program, and trying to do an album. Actually for the most part he’s been in Santa Barbara and I’ve been in San Francisco.
DAVYD: How would you describe the new one as being different?
RYAN: ( they consult among each other) I think it’s more, hmmm… It sounds more, um, more, shit….
SUZANNE: I’m afraid to say it’s more lively or more poppy …
RYAN: I don’t think so.
SUZANNE: Well, I use more words as opposed to just using phonetics.
RYAN: There’s a lot of texture coming from electric guitar too. On our first album it was mostly acoustic.
SUZANNE: Overall it’s a better album….it is. Maybe it’s because we’re sick of Idylls? We don’t even listen to that thing anymore!
RYAN: Idylls was just recorded poorly too. I did it all, I take full responsibility. When we first recorded our demo I never thought the songs would end up on a CD.
DAVYD: What other instruments do you use?
RYAN: Guitars. We process really weird though. People have asked me if there was something else. On a couple of the songs we use minimal keyboards —basically we hold the same note down through the whole song— but basically it’s guitars.
DAVYD: You can definitely hear the guitars, it sounds like a lot more, though.
RYAN: Yeah, this one even more so. Some of the stuff is played backwards, her voice we played backwards on some stuff, too.
SUZANNE: There was this one where we played my voice backwards and then l imitated what was playing backwards, forwards. So it’s like backwards forwards.
RYAN: (laughter) Did you follow that?
SUZANNE: It’s really difficult to sing what is backwards. I really like it though, it sounds really cool.
DAVYD: How about performing live, do you get much of a chance to do that?
RYAN: Not really, we don’t have a band. We did once, but it was before we were Love Spirals Downwards.
SUZANNE: I would love to perform live but the time it takes to put into it I would want to get out of it. That’s why we haven’t. Also, we haven’t had enough material in the past, whereas now I suppose we would.
DAVYD: I think a lot of people were surprised to hear that you were in the San Francisco area because you’ve never played.
RYAN: Right now we’re just a recording band, I think it works better that way because I don’t have a bunch of other musicians to work with. If we played live we’d have to get a whole new concept of “working together.” We’d have to practice and rehearse things. None of that ever happens, we never practice. I just create things and we record them on the spot.
SUZANNE: It’s very spontaneous, even my vocals. We would sit down to play and it would be like “hey, we probably could play this live!” I don’t know if I’ve ever sat down and sang any of our songs from beginning to end, and that’s sort of frightening.
RYAN: I don’t think that’s too frightening, nobody sings all the way through while recording unless it’s folk or something.
DAVYD: Is playing live something you’d like to do in the future?
RYAN: It might be, depending on what happens with us in the near future. Maybe we won’t put something together.
SUZANNE: We’ve got people for bass and backup vocals.
RYAN: I think they’re all up here so maybe I’d have to move back up here.
SUZANNE: My sister would do back-up vocals and she’s down in LA.
RYAN: Yeah, that’s true, and we have a drummer up here too.
DAVYD: I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about you guys….
RYAN: People know of us??!! We don’t know that because we never get out and meet people who know of us. There’s this lack of contact, I guess, but that would be one good reason to go out and play live —to meet people.
DAVYD: So, the next project is finished, do you have any thoughts or plans beyond that?
SUZANNE: Oh God!!
DAVYD: How long have you been working on this?
RYAN: About a year and a half, I started working on writing this music.
SUZANNE: After working on something that long you just sort of want to stop… I don’t know.
DAVYD: Is this something you want to continue with indefinitely? I know you’re going to school, so are you going to pursue something else?
SUZANNE: Well, we definitely do other things. That’s just how I am, I sort of balance everything out. I don’t think I could just sit and do only music, it wouldn’t be enough.
RYAN: Well, it would be impractical too. I don’t think your singing takes up that much time. But the stuff I work on could be a full time job.
SUZANNE: We’ve been talking about that, Ryan’s been talking about not going to graduate school. We’ve just been spreading ourselves too thin. I’m not ready to just quit and do music now, I wouldn’t quit Psychology.
RYAN: So who knows if there will be a third album? I don’t know.
SUZANNE: I think so, it depends on how this one is received.
RYAN: Even if it’s not, I don’t care. I know what I want to start making now, which is good, I guess. After Idylls I had no idea where I wanted to go. I think now I really see where I want to go. Especially after we recorded the last half of the album, I kind of see the structure I’m heading towards.
SUZANNE: What’s that? What direction is that?
RYAN: I’ve kind of talked to you about that before, just think of the last few songs we’ve done and see where they’re going as opposed to where our older stuff was going.
SUZANNE: You want it to sound like Slowdive.
RYAN: (laughter) No I don’t! No, no, It’s kind of hard to describe. We’ll talk about it later.
DAVYD: Off the record… (laughter) By the time people actually hear something it’s not necessarily your creed or your life but it’s definitely a document of a part of your life.
SUZANNE: I was thinking about that today. I don’t think like that, I don’t know if I just view myself as a part-time artist or something. I don’t really identify with myself like that. I don’t reflect a lot on, well, what type of music shall I make, you know? It’s just what comes out, ’cause we have some stuff that is sort of, I don’t know if I should say jazzy, but sort of sensual “Sade” sounding. Then the next day I’ll come up with something really different. It’s funny. I don’t like direction. I don’t think I’d like to fall into just going one direction.
RYAN: Well, direction doesn’t give you a certain sound, you have to make it. It just aims you, steers you, a sort of way. I didn’t have one when we did Idylls. On this new album, I just find myself now aimed at a certain direction. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, we’ll find out in a couple of months if it hurts or not.
SUZANNE: It’s funny because we always think of ourselves as a happy, uplifting band and we don’t know what Projekt is going to think of this new material, cause he hasn’t heard it.
RYAN: He heard the first half, which is more sort of like Idylls. Although they’re not sequenced to be like the first album, but he’s heard the first chunk. I’m in the process of making a tape for him. Maybe he’ll like it, he probably will.
SUZANNE: Yeah, that’s a good question; what if he doesn’t like it?
RYAN: Well, he’ll still release it
DAVYD: You can’t really worry too much about how other people are going to react, then your whole career ends up falling around trying to meet this whole image you created for yourself and what they want from you.
RYAN: Of course you never know if somebody else is going to like it, you know immediately if you like it. That’s what I do. I write what’s going to please me, not somebody else, not the record label, or some unknown hypothetical band somewhere.
SUZANNE: Another thing about what direction we’re going in, there’s not as much experimentation. We very rarely scrap something, we always finish what we start.
RYAN: There’s experimentation. If something sucks, I know it sucks before it ever reaches you… not every song is precious. Well, by the time they get to you they’re precious.
SUZANNE: But, I think most people who make music do it daily and we’re not like that. Every time I’ve done music which has always been with him, it’s like, “Okay, this is for the album.” I don’t reflect on it enough to say it’s going in a certain direction, I just know it’s going to be released.
RYAN: For this album there were songs that we didn’t use just because I didn’t feel they were necessary. They may be released somewhere sometime, probably not though. They were nice songs but I just didn’t see what they contributed once we put all ten songs together.
DAVYD: What’s the new album called?
RYAN: We’re not sure yet…
SUZANNE: Got any good ideas?
RYAN: I don’t know, we’ve been going back and forth with it but I think we’ve narrowed it down to two.
SUZANNE: Which we don’t really like. One of them is Sidhe, which he doesn’t like and the other one is even stupider. If you have any ideas we’ll give you credit. But I like Sidhe, it’s the Gaelic word for wind, which is so pretty. Also, my first dog was named Sid (after Sid Vicious).
DAVYD: Well, is there anything else you’d like to add?
RYAN: NO! (kidding)
SUZANNE: So, do people you know compare us to the Cocteau Twins?
DAVYD: One person said , “If you like older Cocteau Twins then you’ll like them,” but it wasn’t a sturdy comparison.
SUZANNE: Every review we got said Cocteau Twins.
DAVYD: If anything there were more Dead Can Dance type things to me, but I didn’t think that it really sounds like anybody.
RYAN: I think with this one we sound less like anyone, don’t you think?
SUZANNE: Oh yeah.
RYAN: I think it would be much harder to compare us to Cocteau Twins, but we’ll see what people say. I don’t think I’m going to read the reviews this time. They weren’t bad or anything but last time it sort of dawned on me the magazine probably knew nothing about this kind of music, so why do I take this person’s opinion so strongly? Why should I even pay attention to it when they don’t even like this kind of music anyway?
SUZANNE: There was one from Japan, it was so funny because we couldn’t read it except every so often it would say Cocteau Twins, 4AD, Dead Can Dance. Did you know we did a song for the Fifty Years of Sunshine: Tribute to LSD? So people ask us since it’s LSD (Love Spirals Downwards), “Do you guys take LSD?” We used to say it has no meaning but now we say we think love spirals downwards so we can just say that.
