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Lux Interna

@lux_interna_official

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A fever-dream of haunted Americana, apocalyptic mysticism, & cinematic folk noir

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Just back in California after a few very packed weeks in Europe with the Lux crew. Heartfelt thanks to all of you who came out to support us at the WGT — it was a beautiful evening, full of spirit, inspiration, and new and old friends.

We had a great time playing music for y’all, and it was really special to return to the festival after so many years.

Thank you as well to all those who’ve shared their photos and videos—much appreciated! If you have photos or videos from the show please don’t hesitate to DM us.

And more than anything, it was so special to share the stage with the wonderfully talented @jefflinsenmaier on drums and @lauracbates on violin.

Here’s a few candids from the road. Already looking forward to next time!
🙏🩵🌑🔥 by @lux_interna_official

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4 months ago

The woods around our cabin are sacred territory—an ever-changing threshold between shelter and storm. We’re lucky to be surrounded by such radiant, living presence. During the writing and recording of New Wilderness Gospel, the redwoods weren’t just a backdrop—they were companions, witnesses, maybe even co-conspirators. Their silence spoke volumes, and their fingerprints are all over the songs and the novel that grew alongside them.
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“And then they get to swaying. The trees that is. And the branches wave and scrape and scratch wildly against the thick hide of the night sky. Like they’re hunting for stars. Like they’d tear the moon down for company if they could. A bit like a drunkard I once saw at a Pentecostal prayer service. A tangle of grace and violence.”
— Joshua Levi Ian, The Stormwatcher’s Tale
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📸 of Lux Interna by @bobbycochranphoto — one hour before nightfall, June 2024. Forest photos by @kathryn__ian
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#LuxInterna #hauntedmusic #prophecyproductions #GothicAmericana #cinematicmusic #liminalspaces #atmospheric #darkmusic #gothic #darkfolk #apocalypticamericana #ruralnoir #luxinterna #esoteric #esotericism #experimental #deconstructedcinema #americangothic #wilderness taken in Kings Mountain, California by @lux_interna_official

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2 years ago

Gratitude is an overused word in today’s cultural landscape. But honestly, there’s no better way to describe what it feels like to create music with such wildly gifted, passionate, and generous souls.

Making an album together means more than just tracking parts or sharing a stage. It means forging a community of resonance, developing a new language of sound and form, and wandering the edges of some shared terra incognita. At times, we’re graced with brilliant streaks of light. At others, we find ourselves plunging into the darkness of the deep—the tehom. (This is how beginnings begin to begin.)

No matter the moment, it’s been an honor to walk this path with such remarkable artists.

Seven musicians contributed to New Wilderness Gospel—too many for one post. So today, we share portraits of those who traveled with us from the last record, There Is Light in the Body, There Is Blood in the Sun. Stay tuned tomorrow for part two: portraits of those who joined us in shaping the new world of New Wilderness Gospel.

Joshua Levi Ian – voice, guitars, banjo, lyrics, musical arrangements @j_levi_ian
Kathryn Ian – voice, autoharp, hand percussion @kathryn__ian
Kris T. Force (Amber Asylum, AEAEA, The Bounding Main) – violin, viola, string arrangements @krisforce
Jeff Linsenmaier (ex-The Czars, Wovenhand, Munly & The Lee Lewis Harlots) – hand percussion, piano, electronics @jefflinsenmaier

Band Photo Credits:
Labilis Photography (Joshua, Kathryn, Kris)
Brennan Williamson (Jeff)
All individual band member photos re-envisioned in black-and-white as Polaroids by @kathryn__ian by @lux_interna_official

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a year ago

I know it’s been radio silence for some time now. But we’re overjoyed to introduce you to the newest member of the Lux family, our beautiful Ezrah.

It’s been a time of sleepless delirium up here on the mountain. A time of wonders and colors that catch fire somewhere far beyond the reach of words. Shimmers of worlds that we’d only brushed up against before in dreams, now, here in the flesh.

As summer blurs into fall, we’re slowly starting to return from our hermitage. We’re learning to hear the music he brings, listening and finding the right notes of response. Together, a new song is unfolding in the cabin, weaving a new living harmony under the redwoods and autumn stars.

During these strange days and nights, I’ve often reflected on a particular passage that shows up toward the end of the excerpts we chose from the New Wilderness Gospel novel in the Artbook edition. John, a half-mad desert seer, is speaking to the road-weary Joe, deep in the Mojave. I wrote those words long before I could ever have dreamed of Ezrah’s arrival. But in hindsight, they feel uncannily prophetic:

“One path through the sands; the other hidden in the deep wood. I’ve whispered it to him through so many long nights. Now I say it to you plain: you must be born again and all your days must be gathered up inside you and kneaded through with light. You two-as-one must be three—father, mother, ghost—to bring the child back into world and speaking and feeling and flesh. The resurrection is the incarnation if you look close with your eyes and your heart crossed.”

A resurrection indeed! taken in Kings Mountain, California by @lux_interna_official

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9 days ago

Back home among the redwoods, we are still in the early days of getting to know our newly born son, Ezrah—fully enmeshed in a semi-sleepless and cyclical world, intimately interwoven with home and hearth: a strange space wherein the mythopoetic and the domestic blur and meld.

This is a season of slow unfolding, and of tiny moments that open onto immense depths.

It’s only now, in the few in-between times when we’re not fully caught up in the present, that we’ve begun to sort through the documentation of our time in Europe this past spring. A very different time, marked by very different forms of intensity—but deeply meaningful as well.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more artifacts from the spring’s symposium, concerts, and recording sessions. For now, we’d like to begin with a clip of Wounded Stag from our show at @wgt_leipzig in Leipzig’s Parkschloss Ballsaal, kindly captured by our comrade in spiritual struggle against the archai, @skt_ander . And many thanks also to our comrades @effata.music for being so kind as to let us borrow their guitar for the tuning change. 🙏🙏🙏

We played on the eve of Pentecost Sunday—and I do think there were tongues of fire hovering over our heads.

It was a very special show, with a very special lineup, and an honor to share the stage with the brilliantly talented and beautiful spirits @jefflinsenmaier and @lauracbates But it was especially meaningful to have our son onstage with us as well, for the first—and last—show of our pregnancy.

We always dedicate our performances to an idea, an aspiration, or a dream. Our WGT show was a ritual dedicated to beautiful new beginnings and the unfolding of bright new worlds.

Looking back from where we are now, that dedication feels more resonant than we ever could have known less than 3 months ago. by @lux_interna_official

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2 months ago

Friends!

We’ve been rather quiet of late.

Since returning from Europe, life has been (wonderfully) full—and has changed in ways we’ll be sharing properly before long. There is much to tell: concerts, recording sessions, new footage, and much more. But that can wait for another day.

Bandcamp Friday is again upon us. To say thank you for your continued support, we’re offering 15% off all physical merchandise through our Bandcamp site. Just be sure to select “Directly support the artist” when making your purchase.

Use the code AURORA at checkout.

Thank you, as always, for being a part of our community. We appreciate your support. 🩵

A luminous summer to you all.

Joshua & Kathryn

🖤

#BandcampFriday #LuxInterna taken in Mojave Desert by @lux_interna_official

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2 months ago

In this summer of wild new beginnings, my mind keeps returning to a short poem by Thoreau on what he calls the "inward verdure" of the world—the hidden and inexhaustible power of renewal that continues to work beneath the visible surface of things, forever eluding our attempts to harness or tame it.

Though these photographs were taken during an early morning hike rather than the moonlit walk that inspired Thoreau's poem, I could feel that same secret green force coursing through the light:

And nought disturbs the serious life of men.
But behind the sheaves and under the sod
There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered,
The true harvest of the year—the boreal fruit
Which it bears forever,
With fondness annually watering and maturing it.
But man never severs the stalk
Which bears this palatable fruit. taken in Kings Mountain, California by @lux_interna_official

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3 months ago

Each summer unfurls its own unique and rich celebration of life. But for us, this summer is without precedent—bursting with deeper, brighter, and wilder colors, alive with spirit and mystery, speaking in strange new tongues.

This month we’ll be welcoming our first child into the world.

A few weeks before our son made his presence known, having hit a patch of writer’s block while working on some new song sketches, I had taken to reading one piece of unfamiliar poetry each morning to refresh my relationship with language. I pulled a card crafted by Maria Popova containing a striking cut-up poem:

It is the nature of the mind
To live in the confines of its ideas
Until you encounter
Something never imagined
Some great profusion of the heart
That suddenly
Enlarges reality
And tasks you with
Being wholly alive.

Although I couldn’t have imagined the context in which I would one day reread them, these words immediately struck a chord. After copying the collage poem into my journal, I scrawled down a prayer of sorts:

“More intensity. More beauty. More inspiration. Please.”

My prayer would not remain unanswered. No doubt we’ve been cast into an adventure that will lead to “some great profusion of the heart that suddenly enlarges reality and tasks [us] with being wholly alive.” And no doubt it will be intense, beautiful, and inspiring—even if it reminds us from time to time that terrifying and terrific share a common etymological root.

A New Wilderness Gospel indeed! by @lux_interna_official

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3 months ago

Each star pierces
the thick black skin of night—
an open wound in time’s dark body,
wet with the blood of eternity.

We are pulled upward,
stretched between the damp earth
and the beyond of the heavens.

Umbilical,
the desire that threads us
into the world within the world;
the soft silver shimmering
at the edge of second sight,
quivering within
the ghost-light glimmer
of summer’s secret soul.

Joshua Levi Ian Hazer
Kings Mountain, 6/26/26 taken in Kings Mountain, California by @lux_interna_official

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4 months ago

Summer has finally come to the mountains.

The light threads jagged Pentecostal tongues through spring’s once-dense fog. Tiny flames hang above our heads and a new language emerges—diurnal longing spoken in the grammar of a slow reverberating dream.

Secret colors shimmer in shadowed places where quivering wisps of cool air haunt the blossoming kingdom of day. Skin-soft memories swarm at the edges of sight as our veins course with the wild white static of the sun’s invisible song.

We are drawn up into a new mystery, captured by the sudden realization that light too is part of the great darkness of God: beautifully beyond word and image, boundless and shameless in its grace and giving. taken in Kings Mountain, California by @lux_interna_official

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4 months ago

After an inspiring run through Europe—leading a symposium in Amsterdam, performing at WGT in Leipzig, and recording at Klangbild Studios in Berlin—we’ve returned home to the redwoods and Pacific fog. Europe gave us much to reflect on, and we’ll share more from the journey soon. For now, a few images from our first night walk near our home, paired with words from Gabriel, one of the voices that speaks through New Wilderness Gospel:
“The hour is, as they say, getting late. A thick blue darkness creeps across the western hemisphere. It fills up the eyes and lungs of a billion sleeping bodies. Petals of black fire fall over the shapes of distant mountains and the birch in the valley shine white as teeth.
Or perhaps it’s early. Dusk and dawn, like dogs and wolves, are hard to tell apart in the twilight. Well, whether late or early, inter canem et lupum, let us hope for the latter rather than the former as we leave behind the domesticity of day to wander in the wilderness of night.
But best to leave behind these polarizing metaphors and moralizing metaphysics altogether. No more pitting light against dark, dog against wolf. These dualisms are merely the phantasmal flickers of a grand and dangerous illusion that took up residence within us long ago.
There is no going back and no back to go to. Only into storm and into dark and into what is beyond all vision. But go on, we must. The new beginning we seek is neither behind nor before us; it’s eternal and ever-present. A perpetual not-yet-ness and an always-open now-ness—a possibility that things can be otherwise. It’s the hidden river we dive into when we truly choose ourselves. When we answer the call.” by @lux_interna_official

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4 months ago

A quick glimpse of Into Night from our set @wgt_leipzig. Thank you to our wonderful audience—it was such a great pleasure to play for you. Thank you to our dearest brother-in-spirit @skt_ander for his lending his talent in shooting this video. And so much love to our fantastic partners in crime @jefflinsenmaier and @lauracbates — it was an honor to share the stage with you. May all shine. 🩵🩵🩵 by @lux_interna_official

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5 months ago