Dream pop

"Ryan Lum - guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion, programming, sampling, recording, mixing, production"

"Suzanne Perry - vocals, lyrics"

"I begin again, As the world outside ends. Dense, even in the still light, To owe you my life. I tell you, Make castles when you want to, And fill them with sights. Stir about the stars, During nights below these tides."

"Were beeth they biforen us weren, And hadden feeld and wode. The wood comes into leaf, Thou might and canst and owe sheld. Therein never havest owest then, Ychabbe y-yerned yore"

"Will you fade now, should I let you? Met with indifference, I remain. So much depends now on this distance, These things escape. Well now I'm too dizzy, I am out of myself. Can you feel it? Too much within yourself. I grow dizzy."

"Your lips are conquerors, Your lips are filled with lies. Lost, lost in what seems, That’s how it should be. Who, who is to see, We write in water, Now."

"Sky's the same as it always was, Nothing we do. So hard to keep anything, When you're expected to. This is the time when water stops, History dies with you. Like rings of trees in sideways forest, Forgetting."

"Stretch stretching, Far beyond this delta between we. Dive, diving, Deep beneath the surface suddenly. All my thoughts are broken. All the words are worn. Can it just be spoken? Can it just be warm?"

"City moon so soon, You’re the world to me. Barely one, Star which hung, Sailing to the sea. And yellow time is overhead, Unchanging things imprinted. Can it all be clear?"

"I'd cross the ocean just to be there by your side. I've felt the water as it's river flows to dry. The night sky warms me, tell me should I close my eyes? Those lights that blind me, say you, "Just you step inside." Right by your side. Right by your side."

"Trom rey am Lea lam Fiore fio Freya say Dolce spira Scherza mira Va go"

"I'm about as Gothic as Snoop Doggy Dog. I've never categorized myself nor my art as Gothic. I really don't understand where people get the idea that we are Gothic."

"Projekt has been successful at marketing itself to goths. We're not gothic, nor are any of the bands that influence us. Whoever thinks that we or Slowdive or the Cocteau Twins are goth must have a funny idea of what goth is."

"The last time I went to a gothic club in L.A. was in 1989…I believe that the whole gothic club scene here has grown lifeless; there’s no new creative influx… I remember myself and others leaving that whole scene for good in 1989 and headed for the then-new "Acid House" clubs such as the "Alice In Wonderland" themed Alice’s House which had the life and energy that had been missing for so long in the goth scene.*"

"There was a certain vibe at Projekt Festival… I don’t think people realized we were the artists! When we walked out on stage I had this really trippy shirt on, and people laughed at me up at the front!"

"The conflict arose because at least half of the people came to party, show off their cloaks and fangs, and make new Gothic friends, in any case not for the music."

"I have nothing against goth music. What I am against is people summing us up in one fell swoop as a goth band… it’s a disservice, it’s dishonest, it’s inaccurate. People can think of us whatever they want… people think we’re a goth band, or a new age band, folk band, techno band… even a yuppie band! Not that we’re yuppies, but yuppies can dig our sound. Even adult contemporary has been thrown around. It just goes to show that our music is open ended."

"Sure, we sound like them in certain analysis, but in a broader sense you could say we sound like 10,000 Maniacs if you don’t know music all that well. It depends how far you want to split hairs. Do I mind being compared to them? Yes, if people think we’re trying to be like them or sound like them… It takes the uniqueness away from us and tries to conveniently classify us. The same with comparing us to gothic bands. We’re not a gothic band, we’re not an anything band. We just make pretty music… To try to sum it up like that is problematic. You’re going to miss something."

"I really don't think we sound like them, to be completely honest. I'm not in denial or self-deception, it's my honest belief that if you listen to our music, we don't sound like the Cocteau Twins."

"It's hard to think of a band name; we had to think of one rather quickly to send our demo tape out. We should have just sent it as Ryan and Suzanne! Anyway, our choice of band name didn't follow from our wanting to associate ourselves with the drug."

"We were listening to the radio one night --late-- to a new age show and the woman was saying, “Love, it spirals, upwards, upwards!” It stuck in Suzanne’s head because it was really late… 3 or 4 in the morning. We were parked in front of her house. It tripped us out a lot. So we said, “OK, that’s the band name, Love Spirals Upwards.” Then we decided to change it to "downwards.""

"It seems like it could be a contradiction, but it’s not. Our band name, in a way, reflects our way of making lyrics and our whole attitude towards music. What sounds best is what works."

"We weren't trying to be a band, so we were shocked and surprised when there was any response at all. We mailed out the tape to three companies: 4AD, Creation, and Projekt - who we didn't know about, we heard of it through a friend of a friend. Sam wrote us back a letter of interest. He didn't say he would sign us or anything, but he wanted to hear more stuff."

"Why did we even send it out? I guess I was recording another band here and they were making a tape to send out places, so we figured, 'Hey, we can do that!'"

"It's been an important pursuit of mine, but I never had any intention of pursuing music as a sort of career, on a 'professional' level. I just always made music for myself. It made me happy. I'd been doing that for years, until Suzanne came into the picture."

"We started singing together in January of 1991."

"We were boyfriend/girlfriend for maybe a year or two before I had her sing on my music. I knew her two years and I never knew she sang that well!"

"A lot of those songs for Idylls I had never intended to be released ever, they were just demos — not all of them, maybe half the songs were just demos — that got turned into real songs. On this new album [Ardor] since we were signed, obviously I knew they were going to be released. As far as a concept, um… no, not really. I had more — on this album — of a sound concept, but it kinda hit me when I was almost done with the album. Maybe the way I mixed the songs kinda tied them all together.*"

"I'll come up with some chord sequences that I like on acoustic guitar and build from there. After that, it's all very intuitive. An idea comes in the studio and it's recorded right then."

"It's usually a building process, it's just different what I start building from. Sometimes it will be a drum sound, and I'll build on that, or it will be a keyboard or acoustic guitar part. It gets turned into a pretty full blown instrumental after awhile, and then the vocals usually come in last - near the end - and I'll fix up the drums and mix it down sometime later."

"We've got our own home recording studio. In fact, the way we write, we have to do it at home. We don't make up 10 or 11 songs and say, 'Okay! Time to go to the studio and record all the songs!' I'll have some rough sounds or ideas and I'll record them down on tape or into the sampler, and from there I'll start getting more ideas. It will build from what I previously recorded. That would be a very costly, practically impossible, thing to do in the studio. We would be racking up the kind of budget like Sgt. Pepper's or something!"

"I'll do the music first, and when it's almost done, Suzanne will listen to it, then we both make up the vocal parts. We don't rehearse or anything, I just start laying the tracks."

"For the most part, I'll always have the music almost done. Sometimes I won't have the drums finished, or I might have a guitar part or two left, but the music's done. Once I have that done, I'll bring it over to Suzanne and she'll start humming and making up vocal parts. From there, we'll start getting words fitted in to it, we'll record that, and then I mix the song down and it's done. It could take many months."

"I don’t think Suzanne was as easily able to make parts for this kind of music as she was the more acoustic based music. Her sister on the other hand was making up parts left and right, so it kind of worked out."

"I was surprised by how few people seemed shocked by it! I guess people that liked our sound before –if they truly liked it– they liked our new sound, too. It still has all the mood and feeling as our old music does, it just has more drums, so as long as you’re not beatophobic — and there are those out there, trust me, I’ve met a few people who just can’t like our album because of the beats. They said, ‘Just get rid of the drums and I’ll like it,’ and I go, ‘It’ll be really boring then!’ So, assuming you’re not the beatophobic type, yeah, most people have gone along with it. I’m surprised by how many people think it’s our best record. I think it’s our best record."

"The last song we recorded was our Christmas track, "The Little Drummer Boy." I don't know exactly how many songs that she'll be singing on. Like on Flux, she sang on about half of them or so, but yeah, she'll be working with me, I’m sure Anji will be working with me on some of the new tracks. Maybe Kristen --she sang on two cool tracks on Flux. Anji here has sung on two unreleased tracks that I made last fall. They’re more of dance tracks that I’m deejaying."

"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."

"It's really weird to have these songs - some on Idylls have been out for years - and going back and playing them now. The only time they existed is us recording them -- we never rehearsed the songs once in our lives. I'm not kidding."

"We don’t really tour per se. It’s usually been a few one-off shows or a string of small shows put together. I’ve never been, like, packed in a van on the road for a month. It sounds kind of, I don’t know, not fun? I like the music part. I like seeing things. But… traveling too much can get kind of wearying. I might starting hating everyone, all my friends I’m traveling with. It’s always been more of a studio project than jamming live, so you know, less reason to wanna go out and jam live, since we don’t really do it here at home, anyway."

"More of a spiritual experience. Some kind of musical listening experience that guides you in a higher direction. Not higher like taking drugs, but lifting them up a little bit, engaging their spiritual dimension."

"I’ve just never felt that art must have meaning: it just is. It’s sort of a funny fallacy that most people seem to insist upon everything in the world as having meaning. What is the meaning of a sunset? What’s wrong with just simply experiencing it? Likewise, our art exists without demanding that it has some higher or more important existence apart from the experience of it. Its meaning is irrelevant."

"Oh I don't know what Suzanne is singing about. She just uses words that sound good. There's no storytelling or anything like that you are supposed to get.... Asking her to write a real story or poetry would be almost a foreign concept."

"I believe that many people think that we are weird mysterious people, perhaps because our music is a bit weird and mysterious. Many interviewers seem a little surprised when they meet us. I think that they were expecting us to be different than how we really are in person, which is really down to earth and real. We are definitely not pretentious."

"Our main quality is that we never pretend to be someone we’re not. We’re not interested in technical perfection or impressing anyone—we care about emotion."

"A friend recently transcribed what she thought were the lyrics of our new songs, and they were different from ours. But the interesting thing is that her lyrics were just different from ours, not better or worse. The way she had imparted her meaning to the lyrics was really intriguing. That’s why I think it’s so exciting to use lyrics like ours: there’s not a single meaning that everyone is expected to understand. I bet there are as many different meanings for our songs as there are people that they listen to them."

"In junior high and early high school I had maybe three or four years of guitar training, but I didn't really learn anything after the first year or so. I don't know why I kept going."

"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."

"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!"

"I'm a firm believer of always trying different things, trying to push myself, not falling back into what I did before - even if it was successful. I get bored, and I feel as if I've cheated myself, too, if don't push myself to do something new."

"All of my other albums I really cringe at listening to. Actually, it's kinda sad; Flux is the first one now where it's like, 'I finally did it right!'"

"It’s kinda funny, I listen to lots of electronic stuff but most of my music is very acoustic guitar based. I go back and forth between pure acoustic music and then I let to go full on with my analogue drum machines and samplers and just tweaking knobs and stuff. Just to keep things fun… I guess if I did too much of one thing I’d get kind of burnt out."

"I make what deeply moves me and what feels right and don’t worry about what kind of genre it is. I probably cut across too many genres anyway to be considered as being a part of any genre. I’m just some guy that makes music in my bedroom. Scenes and genres don’t exist in my bedroom."

"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."

"When we create, we don’t worry about what style or genre it is. We just do it. Labels are useful for stores and marketing, but we create from feeling, not classification."

"Where we are now is pretty much what I have expected. I never wanted to try to become a huge band like Nirvana. I'm happy with where we are at."

"I don't have this big scheme or plan; I may stop soon, or I may go for another ten years!"

"Our music exists outside of any particular time or place. It’s music to be listened to today or tomorrow. When you hear a song from a certain era, you usually have to have lived through that time to fully understand it. With our music, that’s not necessary."

"I've been in choirs and have had some voice class, but I have not had any formal long term training."

"We were actually going out before we started doing music together. I had never done music with anyone before."

"He had a couple other singers before, like he was trying my sister out. It's funny because I was in London at the time going to school, and he was sending me tapes with my sister on it, and I thought, 'I can sing that. In fact, I can sing that better!"

"My sister was singing with Ryan, maybe like one or two songs, and then I was going to school in London for awhile and hearing tapes of my sister's, and they never really got off the ground and did that much stuff. So I came back, and basically a little bit after that, we started singing -- I started singing on his music... It wasn't like we were singing together a lot or singing together live a lot. We did two songs together; we crapped one and kept one, then we did two more, which gave us three songs. We sent them out to Sam of Projekt and that was it. That's how it started."

"We just decided to fool around with doing music, but actually Ryan resisted me singing on his music for awhile because he thought it would cause problems in our relationship."

"The first song we ever made was "Forgo," which is on Idylls. I had never written a song before. I just got in there and started humming in the microphone and that's how it happened. And we listened to it and we thought, 'Hey, that's not too bad!' And then we just made a couple more and just sent them out."

"What it was, was that we were coming to the end of the summer and we had set ourselves a deadline. We did 3 songs and sent them out to 3 places and figured if no one called us on it, we'd just keep making music."

"We got a card from one of our friends who goes to art school... Susan, Sam's girlfriend, goes to school with our friend."

"We later learned it was Susan who originally liked our music. It was Susan who, I guess, really found it and said, 'Oh, listen to this.' I think she pushed Sam into contacting us."

"We had to scramble to make more songs for Sam to listen to. I call us a 'Made to Order' band; we write only what is required."

"We didn’t have one and we were trying to figure out what to call ourselves. I think this is funny --and Ryan gets mad when I tell this but-- we were calling ourselves “The Flower People,” from 'Spinal Tap.' The whole idea of a band was a joke to us. In L.A., but probably everywhere, you meet people and they’re all in a band. So we thought it was stupid. When we put the demo tape together, we didn’t have a name. The only other band names we had made up were jokes, funny names."

"People try to decipher a meaning in our name, but honestly, there isn’t one. It’s pure aestheticism. Beauty matters to us for its own sake. We’re aware that Love Spirals Downwards sounds like “LSD” to some people, but our music isn’t meant to “alter consciousness” or be psychedelic. It’s just music with an emphasis on beauty and feeling."

"I don't see myself as an artist or as a musician. I don't think about it as part of my identity... My music is something where I walk in and do it, and it's not something I think about in my everyday life. I don't dwell on it, or think, 'This or that will be a great part for a song!' When I'm in the studio, it's sacred, but I don't carry that artist persona around with me at all."

"I've gotten conditioned to only do it in there. I have to have the microphone on and we make the songs up as we're recording. It's like going to church and you have this experience."

"He’ll usually do the whole music and play it for me, and I’ll come up with ideas, just notes and things, either on my own or with him."

"As far as vocals go, I'll usually listen to a completed - or near completed - instrumental and just start humming some catchy notes into the microphone, find some that I like, then do a rough recording of them and see how they sound. If I wait a day or two and see if the notes stick to me, I'll sometimes try to write some words or phoentics to them. We get a mood for a song and if I think it has an Italian or Latin mood to it, I'll try to almost mimic that language to evoke that sort of mood. The songs in that way, at least on Idylls are more thematic. I tried to do something different with Ardor where I thought I'd maybe write some words to it. There are definitely more actual words on Ardor."

"Some of them are in English and they make some sense, and some are in English and they make no sense. And there are others that are in a "make-believe" Italian, and then there's a kind of "make-believe" Latin, but I don't know Latin or Italian. And there's some French too... and some Indian, too, make-believe Indian. Most of it doesn't make any sense. Some of the new stuff actually does have a little meaning. Still, even if it does, I don't pronounce it well enough so that you can tell. When I'm singing it, I'm not concerned with pronouncing it so that you could understand it. I guess its not meant to be understood."

"I'm not really sure what prompted me to do that. I have a couple theories about it, though. The first theory is that I don't know how to write lyrics, so that's the only thing I think I could come up with - the only thing I could produce. The other theory is that I like doing it."

"It's a lot harder for me to write words that are personal than to write nonsense lyrics because I'm getting into things that I reveal about myself. I don't know how comfortable I feel with expressing myself in that way or putting that into music."

"It's amazing how little I think about my music. Like I never realized all the images it evokes... But I guess I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to write. I don't necessarily think it's my gift. I'm not bad, but that's not the means by which I express myself. And I don't know how much I want to reveal of myself, like the really personal stuff."

"I compartmentalize my music. It's something I do as a hobby and a side thing, and I don't really mix it with my life. Even my everyday emotions I don't think I mix with it. But every so often, I think it seeps in. It's interesting, because it truthfully makes me uncomfortable. In some ways, I think it's kind of sappy and too expressionist to put your life in your music like that."

"To me it’s very separate, I mean, writing poetry or writing prose --literature and that-— is completely separate from music. I mean, I think that’s why a lot of times we use nonsensical syllables and just whatever sounds good because… it’s about sound, you know? Really for us it’s about sounding — I don’t know — beautiful or whatever we want it to sound like."

"I don't even think about it like that. It's not part of my identity. I don't go around saying, "I'm in a band." That's usually the last thing I mention."

"I don't think I could just sit and do only music, it wouldn't be enough. I'm not ready to quit and do music now. I wouldn't quit Psychology."

"I hope people have a good experience, or a positive experience, but beyond that, I don’t expect people to get much from it. That’s not my intention when I make it. I don’t even know why I do it. It’s fun for me. It’s fun. When you get past that, you get in trouble. Nobody ever experiences anything like you want them to. And who am I to want people to experience in a certain way? Beyond that, I can’t even control that… I can’t control if people are going to buy it, or even care about it. I really loathe the music business."

"If you can listen to a song that you created, that you wrote, and it still gives you the chills even after listening to it over and over again, that’s a good song."

"For a long time I felt that we hid behind the effects."

"I experience different emotions for different songs… longing, desire, disappointment, escape. I prefer the overall impressions a song makes upon you. I find words to be limiting in that they are usually intended to convey meaning. I don’t want to impose that much on a listener or myself. I believe our songs aren’t about “getting it”, instead they are about experiencing what is created. I like to think of the music we make as art that is intended to be experienced by every individual in their own way."

"It’s interesting because you might not know our language, but even so, you get similar emotions as those who do know it. Also, when you don’t understand a language, you really concentrate on the sounds. For us, words don’t just relate to the language and the images they project; they also relate to the sounds, because the intention you give them is completely linked to how you position your tongue, how loud you sing, or what type of microphone you use."

"Usually it’s more of a collaborative effort. It’s not that this one [Flux] wasn’t, but he took it in directions that I wouldn’t necessarily have gone if I was there at every moment. It’s more of Ryan’s work. It’s something that he fashioned out of his own likings. For me, making a more electronic sounding records was lazier. There's a lot fewer lyrics and there's a lot more repetition. I feel like I cheated."

"Let’s talk about how good that album ['Flux'] is. If you’ve heard me speak about the album any other times, I’ve completely switched my opinion now. My promotions people have talked to me. I love it. Buy it. I love it! Everything is so great! That’s what people want to hear — how wonderful everything is and what a wonderful process it was making the album. They don’t want to hear the truth."

"The work we did in that [Love Spirals Downwards] is pretty timeless. A few years may have passed but I still feel like that possibility is always out there. I get a good feeling when I see an LSD disc out there. It’s still going on in its own way, even if I’m not doing any actual work. For me, Melodyguild is a lovely extension of what I did with Love Spirals Downwards."

"It is an arguable fact that there are three bands whose names are synonymous with the world-renowned Projekt label: Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Lycia and Love Spirals Downwards."

"LSD just might be the burgeoning leader of another full-on ethereal rock revival."

"Out of all the chosen representatives of this genre, Love Spirals Downwards is the most acceptable to general audiences. Dare we call it 'pop ethereal'?"

"Make no mistake, Love Spirals Downwards stand alone as a landmark to ethereal and madrigal greatness."

"Love Spirals Downward[s] shares a psychedelic code with the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and a musical code with groups like the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance."

"Suzanne's voice could lull a King's Army into blissful dreamscapes, thereby calming war torn battlefields'"

"I want to hold the hand inside I want to take the breath that's true I look to you and I see nothing I look to you to see the truth you live your in shadows fade into you into your darkness"

"“Fade Into You,” the dreamiest single of the ’90s, broke Mazzy Star through to the charts with its aching beauty. But anybody expecting their full-length to sustain that sense of fragile romance must have been shocked by the disquieting dread that hangs thick over So That Tonight I Might See, a dream-pop album with a gothic core."

"Our hearts just won’t die It’s the trip, keeps us alive"

"They’re following some dance of light Tearing into the night Watching you fall asleep The sweetest dove in a dream"

"I'll break your heart to keep you far from where all danger starts"

"All on my own Here I stand. Am I humble, am I ghost? I’m on a limb to climb To something lawless I hope Am I humble, am I ghost? I found a way To look towards this day But it all hooked up This could only go one way I’m not alive, I’m not alive enough."

"Love is to die, love is to not die, Love is to dance, love is to dance. Love is to die, Why don't you not die? Why don't you dance? Why don't you dance and dance?"

"Loveless isn’t just an essential alternative rock album, it’s also one of the best albums of the 90s. It’s like an overwhelming out-of-body experience – transcendent beauty with a capital ‘trance’ – and its reinvention of sound, texture and mood in rock music sounds as radical now as it did in 1991. My Bloody Valentine spent two years in the studio perfecting [their] formula: a dizzying blend of roaring guitars and sensual vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Loveless is a classic that’s spawned many imitators but has no peer."

"You could say, shrewdly, that Loveless combines two main modalities of the ’90s by being the greatest rock album that is made almost entirely of samples—drum loops, guitar feedback, vocals, all sent through an Akai S1000, which could then be triggered from a keyboard—creating a singular melding of dream-pop and acid-house and hip-hop that defined a new genre called shoegaze. You could say its underlying philosophy remains as relevant as ever: that sleepiness is a largely underrated state of being, that our unconscious impulses are far more truthful than our conscious behavior, that the best music should feel like it could go on forever. You could say that its chief architect, Kevin Shields, is influenced by no one more than fellow Irishman Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher who coined the Romantic ideals of beauty and sublime, and who wrote that the richest emotional response from art comes from the “terrible uncertainty” it can elicit."

"Burn this whole madhouse down."