LOVE SPIRALS DOWNWARDS: Idylls

Love Spirals Downwards

Idylls

© 1992 Ryan Lum (BMI) (617026003627)

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A unique, sumptuous sound composed of interwoven acoustic and electric guitar textures with exotically layered ethereal female vocals. The band's popular 1992 debut album.

tracks

1 Illusory Me
2 Scatter January
3 Love's Labours Lost
4 This Endris Night
5 Forgo
6 Eudaimonia
7 Dead Language
8 Stir About the Stars
9 Noumena of Spirit
10 Ladonna Dissima
11 Drops, Rain, and Sea
12 Waiting for the Sunrise
13 And the Wood Comes Into Leaf

notes

A remastered reissue of 'Idylls' with additional songs was just released in October 2007. Please see http://cdbaby.com/cd/lsd6 for more info and purchasing!

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"Love Spirals Downwards are the unconscious mind of ethereal music, evoking forgotten memories with subjective, alien tongues. The sounds drift dreamily through one's thoughts like incense permeates the air -- perhaps the spicy fragrance will seduce you like a lover to its heat, or else it will elude the threshold of perception and weave itself into the mind's strata of buried experiences... The result of this Easternish atmosphere, with delicate guitar and ebbing, oceanic female vocals is a taste of the watery, warm, and sweet elements of the earth." - Projekt

Though begun in the late 80's by multi-instrumentalist and producer, Ryan Lum, Love Spirals Downwards didn't truly take flight until the addition of then-girlfriend, Suzanne Perry, as vocalist in 1991. The duo's 1992 debut release, 'Idylls,' introduced listeners to a sumptuous sound composed of interwoven acoustic and electric guitar textures and exotically layered female vocals which melded the 80's 4AD label sound (Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance) with 60's psychedelic folk rock (Popul Vuh, Jefferson Airplaine) and world music to create a hybrid sound well loved by the Gothic and Darkwave community, as well as fans of New Age.

Critics and fans alike have long been fascinated by the mysterious vocal stylings of 'Idylls,' which are by far the most layered and heavily effected of LSD's 4 albums. The band's classic tracks "Scatter January" and "Love's Labours Lost" - as well as a number of others - are lyrically composed of nonsense sounds the duo devised to feign Middle Eastern and Roman languages, while songs like "This Endris Night" and "And the Wood Comes into Leaf" are simplistic reworkings of Medieval classics. "Stir About the Stars" and "Drops, Rain & Sea," while in modern English, still leave quite a bit up to the imagination as far as meaning goes, which is exactly how the band prefers it.

Over their 8 year history, Love Spirals Downwards released 4 albums on Projekt Records; "Idylls" (1992), "Ardor" (1994), "Ever" (1996), and "Flux" (1998), plus 1 single, "Sideways Forest" (1996), and 1 retrospective collection "Temporal: A Collection of Music Past & Present" (2000), incorporating the styles of ethereal, shoegazer, folk, world, ambient, and electronica to create a sound uniquely their own.

Comparisons have been made by critics to Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, His Name is Alive, Enya, Enigma, and The Cranes

reviews

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  • audience from China
    author: Summer

    this is the second album I listened of LSD. the first one is Flux. In China, I'm very lucky to get chance to listen albums of LSD. For Idylls is the first album of LSD, although the skills of mixing is not as good as others, some tracks are really surprising. I really enjoy the third and seventh. Others are also excellent. Thanks a lot LSD

  • Beyond the ether...
    author: LaserEnvy

    Listen to this CD and you will simply forget the harshness of your day. Drift away on the far away vocals of an angel’s voice. Reach out and touch the ethereal.

  • Lovely this.
    author: Muse Magazine

    Lovely this. It all flows together like a dream of some long, sundrenched afternoon with a cool breeze now and then wafting through. It makes one think of gathering flowers or slipping into the shadow. Now some might dismiss this band, saying they're too twee, without any substance, and too much 4AD-inspired ethereal formlessness. But thats's just the point of Love Spirals Downwards, why vocalist Suzanne Perry's lyrics are just word forms, not to be readily understood. Love Spirals Downwards deals in gentle hints of feeling. They don't want to pin down any specific idea with their songs. They are two people creating this dreamlike stuff, and it affects the atmosphere of the album so thats it's insular and isolated from current musical trends. Love Spirals Downwards have created their own world. As already mentioned, Suzanne Perry is the vocalist, with pipes sweet and clear. On " Love's Labour's Lost" she sounds as achingly pure as Karin Oliver from His Name is Alive. At other times, with an Eastern flavored drum pattern surging through songs like "Scattered January," "Forgo, and "Dead Language", she has a haunting sound reminiscent of Lisa Gerrerd's primal voice in Dead Can Dance. Ryan Lum is the other member of the band and he professed admiration for the likes of early 4AD material from the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. It's there in his instrumentation-gentle Cocteau jangles in songs like "Eudaimonia," and "Drops Rain, and Sea." Eastern rhythms and mystic song titles - " Noumena of Spirit," "This Endris Night" - permeates this album. But what truly makes this album is the studio smarts exhibited by the band. Ryan and Suzanne produce the album themselves, knowing only they could understand the kind of music they wanted to create. Love Spirals Downwards are not really a live band, because much of the magic is created in the studio. Idylls is an album to simply listen to, one that will help you escape. It is meant to be enjoyed, as something outside of time.

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