History

Love Spirals Downwards

Suzanne and Ryan Lum grew up in the same part of California but met through a job at Music Plus. Suzanne had planned to study biology but ended up studying psychology.¹⁹ They dated for a year or two before they made any music together.¹⁷¹²²⁰ Ryan had been recording instrumental music at home since the late 1980s¹ and had played in other bands, including one called Reason in the late 1980s; he gave Suzanne a cassette of it that she still has.²⁰ They started singing together in January 1991.⁹ The first song they made was "Forgo." "I had never written a song before," Suzanne said. "I just got in there and started humming in the microphone and that's how it happened."¹¹

That summer they gave themselves a deadline and recorded three songs: "Forgo," "Mediterranea" and "Dead Language." They had no band name yet and jokingly called themselves The Flower People,⁸¹⁰¹⁵ and even played a show under that name, at a coffee bar near Claremont, California, to perform their very first songs together. This was the beginning of Love Spirals Downwards.²⁰

Around then, a promo card for Projekt Records came their way. Their friend Tom Pathe was at art school with Susan Jennings, the girlfriend of label founder Sam Rosenthal, and she had told Tom her boyfriend ran a record label.¹² Susan later became a photographer for the band and was credited with its photos in Acoustic Guitar in 1997.¹⁸¹⁹ Suzanne and Ryan decided to put together a demo tape. For about two days the band was called Love Spirals Upwards,¹⁴ but after weighing LSD against LSU, and the feel of the name against the mood of the music they were making, they changed it to "Downwards." That is why "Downwards" is so central to the origin story of the band Suzanne Perry and Ryan Lum co-founded.²⁰

With the name settled, Tom helped them design a logo and a cover for the demo tape. Suzanne still has a copy of that cassette.²⁰ They mailed it to 4AD, Creation and Projekt, and Projekt was the label that answered.¹⁰ Suzanne later learned it was Susan who first loved the demo and convinced Sam that they didn't sound too much like the Cocteau Twins.¹² Sam put "Mediterranea" and "Forgo" on the compilation From Across This Gray Land No. 3, which drew international attention, and then offered them an album.²³

Their debut, Idylls (1992), credits Suzanne for vocals, lyrics and songwriting, the way the two worked on every release that followed.⁴ It introduced the sound the band is still known for: Suzanne's warm, lilting voice over Ryan's layered, interwoven guitars, drawing on 4AD-era dream pop, '60s folk and music from around the world.⁵ A few songs, like "This Endris Night" and "And the Wood Comes into Leaf," reworked medieval verses.²

Most songs began with an instrumental base from Ryan. Suzanne would listen, hum melodies into the microphone, record rough takes of the ones she liked, and come back a day or two later to see which still stuck before fitting words to them.¹² Many of her lyrics aren't in any real language: she mixes English with invented Italian, Latin and French sounds chosen for the mood, and uses different voices, "a more powerful voice or a sweeter voice," for different songs.¹²¹³ On Ever the process opened up further, with Ryan laying down basic tracks for her to sing on and then writing new guitar parts around her vocals.¹⁶ "When I'm in the studio it's sacred," she said in 1995.¹² Asked to describe the music, she offered: "Beautiful, melancholy… definitely not angry! Definitely not crash your car music, more soar off a cliff, maybe!"¹⁴

Ardor (1994) leaned further into the voice as an atmospheric instrument. The CD single Sideways Forest and the album Ever followed in 1996; Ever mixed folk-tinged acoustic songs with ambient electronic grooves. Flux (1998) moved toward breakbeat and drum & bass and became the band's best-selling album.⁵

Projekt's Pat Ogl wrote in 1997 that Idylls and Ardor each sold more than 10,000 copies, at a time when the label was still run out of Sam's house.¹⁵ Suzanne is regarded as a classic singer of the "Heavenly Voices" style,² and the band appeared on more than two dozen compilations, including Hyperium's Heavenly Voices series.³ Love Spirals Downwards was mainly a studio project and played live only about a dozen times, almost always acoustically: Suzanne's voice with Ryan's acoustic guitar.⁶¹⁴ Their biggest audiences were about 950 people at the Projekt Festival in Chicago and 1,600 in Mexico City.¹⁸

In January 2000 Projekt released Temporal: A Collection of Music Past & Present, a retrospective that runs backwards from new remixes of Flux songs to material from the first album. Suzanne sings on nearly all of it.⁴⁵

In 2001 the band put out Live, nine concert recordings from the Idylls through Ever years, with Suzanne on vocals and shaker.⁴ She also played the occasional tambourine or bell.¹⁹ The last song the duo recorded together, a drum & bass version of "Little Drummer Boy" made in 1998 for Projekt's Excelsis holiday series, circulated for years and was later released as a digital single.⁴

In 2007 Projekt reissued Idylls and Ardor, remastered from the original DAT masters, with live recordings, compilation-only tracks and outtakes.²

Role

Vocals, lyrics, co-writer

Label

Projekt Records

Studio albums

Idylls, Ardor, Ever, Flux

Also

Sideways Forest, Temporal, Live

Legacy

The band never formally broke up, and Love Spirals Downwards' original albums remain available. In 1999 Ryan went on to form Lovespirals, a downtempo, chillout project in a very different style.⁶³ Suzanne has always intended to continue Love Spirals Downwards, and as recently as 2023 proposed making new music together.²⁰

Lovespirals, one word, is a separate project with a different vocalist, and Suzanne does not appear on its recordings. Its songs are listed here so they are not mistaken for Love Spirals Downwards.²⁰

Melodyguild

In 2002 Suzanne formed a new band, Melodyguild, with former members of the Los Angeles dream-pop band The Von Trapps. Discogs lists the lineup as Suzanne, Rodney Rodriguez, Cris Miller and Matt Gleason.²⁴ Their cover of Danny Elfman's "Sally's Song" from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a collaboration between Suzanne and Cris Miller, appeared on Projekt's limited Holiday Single 2 CD in 2004. The first original song, "Panamint," came out on a Projekt sampler in 2007.²

After several delays, Melodyguild's four-song EP Aitu was released by Projekt in the spring of 2008. It was Suzanne's first full body of new work in almost a decade.³⁴

Guest vocalist

Suzanne has also lent her voice to other artists' records:

• Falling You: "An Angel, Ameliorate" on Human (2006), then "The End Before the Winds" and "…And the Rains Come in Waves" on Faith (2008), "Champagne" on Adore (2011), and "Until the Stars Align" on Shine (2017, Projekt). She wrote the lyrics for her songs on Faith and Adore.⁴
• Sleepthief: "Empyrean," which appeared on the 2010 compilation Beauty 2 and on the expanded 2015 edition of Labyrinthine Heart.⁴

Back on Projekt

In 2026 Suzanne returned to Projekt Records under her own name, reunited with Cris Miller of Silver Screen. A newly remastered "Sally's Song" was released to streaming services as a single in May, followed by the three-track EP There'll Be No More Promises. The EP has a new title track, a completely redesigned "Ladonna Dissima" (originally on Idylls), and "Sally's Song." Suzanne and Cris are working on new material, and live shows are planned in the Pacific Northwest.⁷

Listen to the new EP →

Interviews

2026: Suzanne talks with DJ Nocturna about her history and the new EP.

Press about the 2026 EP: Side-Line · MusicTAP · Peru Avant Garde (interview, in Spanish)

1992–1999: Love Spirals Downwards magazine interviews, as scanned PDFs preserved by the Internet Archive from the band's original website.

• The Altered MindSep 1992
• IsolationFeb/Mar 1993
• As IfAug 1993
• Fond AffexxionsOct/Nov 1993
• Tear Down the Sky1993
• Danse MacabreMar 1994 · partial scan
• Fond AffexxionsJan/Feb 1995
• The MuseFeb/Mar 1995
• InkspotsApr 1995
• The Ninth WaveMay 1995
• B-SidesJul/Aug 1995
• Carpe Noctem1995
• Requiem1995 · partial scan
• The Daily FreemanNov 6, 1996
• Mean Street1996
• Acoustic GuitarMar 1997
• Projekt Fest guideAug 1997
• KUCI program guideDec 1997
• KeyboardNov 1998
• Fix1998
• OutburnJan 1999
• Losing TodaySep 1999
• Sony SoundbyteDec 1999