By Sean Flinn | March 17, 2000
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| Love Spirals Downwards: (from left) Ryan Lum and Anji Bee. Not pictured: Suzanne Perry. |
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"We're the
first and only for a lot of things on Projekt," says Ryan Lum,
the multi-instrumentalist and driving force behind Love Spirals
Downwards, darkwave label Projekt Record's top-selling act. Lum
is sipping on a soda in a RadioSpy conference room and choosing
his words carefully. He's speaking of his band's use of saxophone
riffs on a song from its latest release, Temporal, a career
retrospective that includes a number of unreleased tracks. Lum
was concerned that Sam Rosenthal, Projekt Record's sometimes finicky
founder, might be less than enthusiastic about the sax track.
Rosenthal, himself the leader of a Projekt band, Modernist goths
Black
Tape for a Blue Girl, is not a person Lum is anxious to displease
and hasn't been entirely happy with the evolution of LSD's sound.
Try as we might, neither Lum nor I can think of another Projekt
band that has ever used a saxophone on one of its songs.
The riffs
are a bit jarring to hear on an album by a band that built its
reputation on Lum's gorgeously gauzy, almost formless instrumental
vignettes and Suzanne Perry's soaring vocals. But then, the Los
Angeles-based band's unexpected transition from ethereal bliss
pop to electronica in the late '90s was, for some, stunning enough
to prepare them for anything the band might do.
As sumptuously
comfortable as LSD's early work may have been, neither the band
nor its label, a stubbornly independent outfit that Rosenthal
started as a way to distribute cassettes of his solo music, has
ever resisted change wholeheartedly.
"[Rosenthal]
actually made a positive comment about the saxophone. He said,
'You know, it fits somehow," recounts Anji Bee, Ryan's self-described
"partner-in-crime" and recent collaborator on everything from
album art to vocals. Lum's experimentation -- with his sound and
with the band's direction -- initially met with grudging acceptance
from Rosenthal, who eventually warmed to the band's new sound.
"It's not
his cup of tea," Lum says of Rosenthal's reaction to the band's
shift in sound from "shoegazer," the ethereal style of feedback-
and synth-drenched pop defined by British bands like My
Bloody Valentine, Slowdive
and the
Cocteau Twins, to drum 'n' bass. "But we more or less have
artistic freedom to do as we please. I guess being the top seller
on the label doesn't hurt us in that," Lum says with a chuckle.
It doesn't
hurt, either, that both band and label are willing to adapt themselves
to the ever-shifting dynamic of the musical marketplace, stylistically
and commercially. Since he formed LSD in 1991, Lum has demonstrated
a consistent willingness to embrace change within the group and
the innumerable contexts in which they work -- style being the
most apparent of these but the emergence of the digital music
marketplace running close on its heels.
"That's something
I've thought a lot about recently, and I'm not sure what to conclude,"
Lum says contemplatively. "Check back in five years and see what's
up," he says with a wry chuckle, knowing full well that five years
is an eternity in Internet time.
But Lum,
who works for a multimedia company that builds Web pages for major-market
radio stations, is fully aware of the Internet's potential to
expand his band's fan base and the need for independent musicians
to move fast in order to capture an audience in the overcrowded
digital music arena. On that front, LSD is already moving at light
speed.
"Our site,
Lovespirals.com
… is a great source of information, and we update the news frequently,
the guest book and all that stuff. You can buy our stuff, and
you can check out audio from all of our albums. And we're going
through and updating that, album by album. Right now, from the
latest album, Temporal, [the site has] some really nice,
high-quality audio that you can hear, even on a 56k modem stream.
It's much better than the RealAudio that we, or most people, have
had in the past. That's one thing that I've always hated about
Internet audio: You spend a year and a half to make this great
album, put all this money and time and love into it, and you want
to show people on the Internet. And it's just these crappy samples."
"It's like
bad AM radio," adds Bee, who handles a lot of the day-to-day work
on the Love Spirals Downwards Web site -- answering fan mail,
fulfilling orders from their "e-store" and administrating
their forums.
"Yeah, it's
horrible," Lum agrees. "But now, I can put something up and say,
'Yeah. This is it. Check it out. In stereo even. It sounds great.'"
And for Lum,
the rapid improvement of streaming audio quality has brightened
the already blinding future of digital music distribution.
"I'm glad
now, finally, that broadband is coming, so we can pump more bandwidth
to people. But even now, the technology of encoding audio for
the Internet has vastly improved over, say, two years ago. I think
you're going to see a lot this year with audio, like with RadioSpy
and all is a great example of how the Internet is finally ready
for audio -- or audio is ready for the Internet. So now's the
time."
Perhaps due
to the Internet's ever-increasing reach, LSD's Web presence enables
them not only to stay in touch with their fans ("You don't have
to print up a dumb newsletter or anything like that. You just
put it up on the Web. It's right there; you can give them way
more than you ever could in a newsletter," Lum explains) but has
also helped them cement a fan base around the globe.
"It's kind
of interesting to see which regions seem to especially enjoy Love
Spirals Downwards because you see a lot of [e-mail] from Spain
and Italy," Bee ponders. "It seems like they really like them
over there. And of course, there are so many people in Mexico
that are just in love with them. They write every week: 'Please
come play again! We miss you!'"
This solid support has, in turn, given the band a way to convincingly make
their case for stylistic freedom. Fan enthusiasm for the group's
work, past and present, made Projekt Records demonstrably more
willing to trust Lum's artistic inclinations.
"I guess, as we proved with Flux,
even though we made an album that's so different from anything
else on the label, people didn't complain. [Rosenthal] thought
that people were going to say that Projekt [a label that typically
markets itself to the goth and industrial community] or someone
sold out, and none of that came out. So I guess he thought it
was cool. He got a little paranoid at first, but mellowed out."
Mellow seems
to suit Lum just fine. While he has recently embraced the sometimes
frenetic style of drum 'n' bass, electronica's most energetic
and quickly mutating subgenre, he strives to maintain the thoroughly
gentle and vibrantly warm ambience that made Love Spirals Downwards
darlings of the dark electronic underground. This effort shines
through in his appearances as a DJ (which have replaced LSD concerts
as live exhibitions of his music) at the Los Angeles and Orange
County, Calif. clubs where he regularly spins his own brand of
drum 'n' bass.
"Most drum 'n' bass I don't like, actually," he explains. "A lot of it sounds
like crazy machines gone nuts, and I'm into the more smooth atmospheric
and jazzy drum 'n' bass. So yeah, it fits in perfectly with my
sound. I guess that's been the common theme with my [work], an
atmospheric sound, and drum 'n' bass took the atmospheric sound
that I like and just went to town with it -- on the atmospheric
side of drum 'n' bass. It's rare that you see a whole genre of
music that's dedicated to atmosphere. And when I found that years
back, it was like, 'Yes! Right on! I can do this.'"
The transition from shoegazer goth-pop to drum 'n' bass unfolds more smoothly
before the ear than the eye, a point that Temporal illustrates
brilliantly. While technically a "greatest hits" album, Temporal
takes on the not-so-obvious task of charting the band's shift
in sound. When heard one after another, LSD's early, more ambient
songs almost beg for the band's current embrace of intelligent
dance music.
"The only thing that's different with my music is some of the sounds and
maybe a little bit of the style," he agrees. "But the vibe is
still the same, meaning that it still comes from the same place.
It's still atmospheric music; it's just done a little differently.
Some [musicians], I think, consciously try to shock people and
make a whole new kind of album. I'm not that radical. It's still
the same 'pretty' music."
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