Lux Interna Interview: “This project needed time to find its form”

In this modern age, few independent artists incorporate sound, text and image, but that’s exactly what Lux Interna accomplish on New Wilderness Gospel.

Spearheaded by the creative alliance of life partners, Joshua Levi Ian and Kathryn Ian, Lux Interna’s fifth album features a 72-page artbook that includes an experimental novella and a fully scored audiobook version. A meticulously plotted, all-encompassing works that gives Lux Interna’s audience a panoramic view of their world.

Following the brooding orchestral folk of 2013’s There Is Light in the Body, There Is Blood in the Sun, the 12-year gap between releases has seen Lux Interna gracefully shift to new creative and conceptual terrains. While there are snippets of their past (the excellent quiet / loud reverie of Her Wilderness), New Wilderness Gospel sees Joshua and Kathryn expanding their artistic reach. Once again joined by Kris Force (violin, viola) and Jeff Linsenmaier (percussion), with the new additions of Adam Torruella (drums), Tim Gotch (bass), and Jackie Perez-Gratz (cello), this latest manifestation of the band combines for something drenched in dark, narcotic Americana.

Both in sound and theme, Lux Interna place you in their world where nature is the focal point. The leaves, the river flow, the campfire flames, all stirring through these songs. The rich protracted electric folk of Dark Fire / Revelator; the shimmering Like Wolves; the profoundly cinematic Over the Timberlines and Into the Night – songs where Joshua’s velvet purr entwines with Kathryn’s supple backing vocals.

Kathryn takes the lead throughout, too. Her haunting delivery on the slow-motion waltz, No Arrow, cutting through the eeriness of the early hours. The Joshua-led Old Blood Blues is equally beautiful. An end time lament that echoes across vast lands, it leads to the exquisite Selva Oscura. Again led by Kathryn, it’s here Lux Interna weave the final threads of sound, text, and image to complete this bold patchwork.

New Wilderness Gospel is all vision and scope. A world away from modern-day creative habits where release campaigns and social media ramblings completely overshadow the art itself, New Wilderness Gospel is an album informed by locality and the intoxicating atmospheres it can offer, as Lux Interna thrive in their natural habitat like never before.

Earlier this month, Joshua answered a series of questions about New Wilderness Gospel, including the fascinating process into how it was conceived.

Sun 13: It’s been 12 years since There is Light in the Body, There is Blood in the Sun – what have you been up to during this time?

Joshua Levi Ian: “Yes, we’ve never been very good at keeping to a typical release schedule. Life pulled Kathryn and me in a lot of different directions for a while – travel, research, writing and defending a PhD, finishing an MFA, teaching, and following new creative sparks. But those years were anything but static for us. We spent much of that time writing, filming, photographing, composing, and occasionally performing or showing multimedia work in art spaces. I also published quite a bit during that period, mostly around mysticism, esotericism, and ecological ethics. All the while, we were quietly shaping what would become New Wilderness Gospel and its companion works. I’ve always felt that some projects have their own internal clock, and this one definitely did. We’ve never been interested in releasing something just to stay visible. This project needed time to find its form – to mature in its own strange rhythm before it finally entered the world.”

S13: New Wilderness Gospel is such an immersive experience. Before I go beyond the music, firstly can you tell us about the recording process?

JLI: “Thanks so much for the kind words! We really did want New Wilderness Gospel to feel immersive – more like entering a world than listening to a collection of songs. And we were lucky to bring that vision to life with a circle of incredible musicians who are also close friends. Kris Force, whose inimitable violin and viola have long shaped our sound, and Jeff Linsenmaier, who played percussion on the previous album, both returned. But we were also joined by new collaborators – Adam Torruella (drums), Tim Gotch (bass), and Jackie Perez-Gratz (cello). Working with them was a brilliant experience; each brought their own energy and texture to help this new wilderness take shape.

“The broader writing and multimedia work unfolded over years, but the heart of the album was recorded live during a few late-night sessions at Louder Studios in Grass Valley, CA. Many of the songs needed looseness and risk, and there were moments of pure improvisation that shaped how they turned out. In an era of hyper-processed sound, we wanted this record to feel embodied and emotionally alive rather than digitally perfect. And since the album wrestles with the idea of wilderness, it felt right to invite some wildness into the process itself.

“After those sessions – and in the midst of pandemic shutdowns – we had to get creative with overdubs, working remotely with people who couldn’t be there in person. Some tracking happened in Oakland, rural Western New York, and Nashville. Our good friend Doug White (Watchman Studios) handled additional tracking and the initial mixes, and the final mix and master came from Jack Shirley (Atomic Garden).”

S13: There’s such a beautifully dark atmosphere to it, which is indicative of the surrounding landscapes in which it was recorded. Coupled with a song like Over the Timberlines which feels very so close to the regional culture, did you grow up in the country, or have these terrains always been of interest from afar?

JLI: “Thank you. Yes, landscape plays a major role in New Wilderness Gospel. While Kathryn grew up in the city, I spent most of my childhood in rural areas between New York and Pennsylvania. Living in somewhat isolated places, and being a bit of a strange kid, I spent a lot of time alone, wandering in the woods and connecting with nature – probably more than with the human world. 

“Among the places that shaped me, Appalachia looms large. Appalachia is a vast, complex territory, fiercely protective of its micro-cultures. Its richness shows up in so many ways: in the haunted beauty of its music, in folk-magic traditions that weave Native American botanical knowledge with European practices, and in snake-handling churches tucked away in hidden hollows. The mountains are ancient and full of secrets. As a child they fascinated – and sometimes terrified – me. It’s a place that leaves a mark on you, both haunted and haunting. I spent many summers there at my aunt’s house, and my father still lives in the region and knows its lore intimately. So, while I can’t claim the deep knowledge of someone who’s spent the majority of their life there, the spirits of Appalachia definitely haunt our music.

“Today Kathryn and I live in the mountains of a very different landscape: the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. We’re lucky to have a small cabin among the redwoods, oaks, and manzanitas, with miles of trails around us. King’s Mountain, where we live, was once home to the Lamchin people, whose culture was violently uprooted during Spanish colonization. Most were forcibly taken to Mission San Francisco de Asís in the late 1700s – a history that still feels alive in the land here, even amid the overwhelming beauty of the area.

“Our cabin sits in a temperate rainforest shaped by coastal fog and Pacific storms. It’s a special place and has deeply influenced New Wilderness Gospel. The winter storms especially left their trace on the writing – there’s nothing quite like watching a two-hundred-foot redwood sway in the wind while the fog coils through the forest. It’s haunting in its own right, another kind of wilderness with its own mysteries and music.”

S13: The accompanying 72-page artbook that includes the novella and audiobook is something beyond the realms that most artists aim for these days. Was this idea concrete from the beginning, or was it something that came to light after you began writing the songs?

JLI: “Alongside being a musician, I’m also a scholar of comparative religion, and the seeds of New Wilderness Gospel were sown when those two worlds started to cross-pollinate. During the final stages of a long-term research project on Jacob Böhme – a seventeenth-century German mystic – I began experimenting creatively in response to the manuscripts I was working with. At first, it was just small things – vignettes, character sketches, scraps of poetry. But distinct voices began to emerge, each with their own histories and spiritual orbits; slowly, they started to take on lives of their own. I eventually translated those fragments into musical ideas, and Kathryn began building connections through her analogue photography.

“So the writing process was really different from anything we’d done before. We completely surrendered to the world that was unfolding and let its logic guide us. As it grew, it became clear that New Wilderness Gospel wanted to be something more than an album – it wanted to be a constellation: a song cycle, a novella, a collection of analogue photography, and a scored audiobook, all orbiting around the same vision.

“During the last stages of writing, some of the main themes we were exploring – crisis, ecological interconnectedness, transformation – suddenly stopped being abstract and burst into our personal lives in unexpected ways. Alongside a series of personal challenges, and the wider political turmoil in the U.S., we found ourselves facing intense environmental events near our cabin in Northern California. At one point our home was just a few miles from the evacuation line as wildfires raged around us. Our inner and outer worlds began to blur together. And this is why, even though NWG might have its conceptual and narrative dimensions, it is also a deeply personal album. 

“Out of that convergence came the idea of an apocalyptic ‘gospel’ for the Anthropocene. By ‘gospel’, we don’t just mean sacred narrative, but also, in the older English understanding of the word, a god-spel—both a story and a spell. And ‘wilderness’ here isn’t only untamed landscape, but a state of being: an inner terrain of danger, reckoning, and transformation.

“So New Wilderness Gospel grew out of an attempt to tune in to the voices encoded in land, body, and mind as each is pushed to its limits.”

S13: From the music to the novella itself, it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s darkest moments. How much has literature informed your music over the years?

JLI: “McCarthy’s work is quite special. I love the texture of his language, the way you can feel the rough materiality of language in his prose. His sentences are hard and unflinching, yet strangely musical, echoing the wild landscapes at the heart of his books. I really admire how he reveals the connection between place, violence, and identity in America without ever explicitly moralising.

“I’ve always been a voracious reader, almost to the point of addiction. Books – often by long-dead authors – can be intense conversation partners that shape how I see the world. I don’t usually read for escape; I read to engage, to wrestle with questions and experiences. That’s probably why I’ve been drawn to mystical and philosophical writing, the kind that pushes language to its limits and tries to name what can’t quite be named.

“So yes, literature inevitably seeps into the music, though rarely in a direct way. The music is a strange place where St. John of the Cross can converse with Wendal Berry and McCarthy with Blake. But I would say that I tend to read a lot of theology, philosophy, and poetry even more than literature, although I’m always trying to round that out and peak my head out into the contemporary world more often. Lately, alongside a deep dive into the German Romantics for a book chapter I’m working on, I’ve been reading the brilliant work of the anarchist philosopher Federico Campagana as well as the wonderful Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón – both remind me that visionary thinking is still alive and urgent.”

S13: Do the lyrics come before the music, or is it the other way around?

JLI: “When working on past albums, the music would usually form slowly around the lyrics. I tend to write far too much at first. Once the music starts taking shape, I cut, rework, and reshape the text so the two really resonate with one another. But as I mentioned earlier, the process was quite different this time. It could be argued that every album is a kind of world-making exercise, but we took that idea even further with New Wilderness Gospel.

“I began by writing much of the text for the novella that accompanies the album, and the songs grew in conversation with that emerging world. At first it wasn’t an intentional working method – more a kind of groping in the dark, guided by intuition and feel. But as Kathryn and I went deeper, we discovered new ways of working. It might sound a little crazy – and I guess it was! – but at some point, we were so immersed in the world we were building that the songs felt as if they were simply arising from it, like artifacts produced by its inner movement. That process, I think, shaped the sonic landscape of New Wilderness Gospel in ways we couldn’t have planned.”

S13: To me Like Wolves is the centrepiece to the album. What can you tell us about this song?

JLI: “Like Wolves was one of the last songs we finished for the album. It’s also one of the most personal pieces, veering away from the character arcs that shape the record’s broader narrative and speaking more directly from our own experience.

“It was written during a very dark period, and the wordless choruses that follow the line ‘all will shine in time’ were attempts to open up a sonic space where that statement might actually ring true – to puncture the heaviness that surrounded us and let a little light in. At its heart, the song is about learning to look unflinchingly into the fiercer, more feral face of love – about learning to be truly alive.

“While wandering the California high desert during a troubled time, we spent time with a company of wolves at a rescue shelter. Though exiled from their native lands, they remained untamed – ferociously alive, alight with something wilder than mere survival, full of both sainthood and savagery. Looking into their eyes, we saw the same fire we wanted to feed within us and each other. The song attempts to translate sparks of that fire into sound. 

“Musically, I think it does feel different from the rest of the record, and it carries something of the road trip that birthed it. I can still feel the heat and shimmer of those long desert roads in the warped ’60s surf guitars, the soaring strings, the lurching Shangri-Las–style basslines, and the hypnotic drums.”

S13: Selva Oscura is a beautiful closer. It feels like one of those moments where you’re recording in the studio and it stops everyone in their tracks. What are your memories of it?

JLI: “Thank you! Yes, I’m really happy with how that track turned out. It was a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier – a live approach to recording where we could respond to the song’s shifting mood in real time. Selva Oscura, which takes its title from Dante’s Inferno – the moment the pilgrim first steps into the dark wood at the start of his journey – has always felt like an ambiguous piece to me. We knew early on it would close the album, but it also opens the transition into the ambient spoken-word work that comes with the artbook edition of New Wilderness Gospel. So it’s both an ending and a beginning. It finishes with the line ‘Guard your heart / In the dark of the long highway home,” which, despite the title’s imagery of getting lost, hints that losing your way is sometimes the first step toward finding home.

“The spoken lyrics – beautifully delivered by Kathryn – tell the story of an old man, Enoch, from the companion novella, facing a storm that rages both outside and within. There’s a moment where everything breaks open, when the storm hits like a hammer. Adam (our drummer) and I felt it at the same instant and just launched into that eruption of noise that crashes before the final calm of the ending chorus. I still remember my headphones flying off as we thrashed through that chaos. It’s one of those moments you can’t script. I love when something unexpected takes over, when you hear something larger than yourself moving through the sound!”

S13: You worked alongside Auerbach Tonträger for the release. Europe and American neo-folk have always seemed to have a very intense relationship, with 16 Horsepower and Woven springing to mind. Why do you think that is?

JLI: “It’s true that there’s long been a kind of dialogue between European and American strains of what might loosely be called ‘neo-folk’. I think it comes from a shared interest in how older forms of human meaning-making – the sacred, the mythic, and even the atavistic – might still be accessed in cultures dominated by late capitalism and secular thinking. Many Americans look to Europe as a landscape of lost traditions and ancient gods, a reservoir for reconstructing a ‘mythic’ sense of identity. Conversely, America offers its own mythological scripts, often filtered through film, novels, and post-1940s music. That legacy definitely shaped our use of the contested word ‘wilderness’ – in a country built on stolen land, the very idea of wilderness isn’t without a dark history.

“Drawing on folk music and aesthetics while working inside a post-folk, individualist culture can become a kind of ‘spiritual archaeology’: an attempt to recover what’s been buried under the noise of technology and progress. I’m sympathetic to that impulse, but wary too. Our music tries to give voice to realities often rendered invisible by the cold light of late capitalism and technological thought, and in that sense it connects with what might be called the ‘mythic’. But mythic thinking has always been a double-edged sword; it can be co-opted to serve authoritarian or exclusionary politics or feed a lazy nostalgia that drifts into apathy. Both tendencies are alive and well in the U.S. at the moment.

“Still, mythic consciousness doesn’t have to be regressive. For me, it’s about stepping briefly outside of time, opening to possibilities that seem impossible within current paradigms. As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote, myth can be “a bearer of possible worlds”—new worlds, new wildernesses that resist the reactionary imagination. Myth unfolds through stories, and stories are endlessly adaptable, capable of changing to fit new contexts and concerns.

“Since you mentioned David Eugene Edwards, it’s worth noting that Jeff Linsenmaier, who’s played percussion, piano, and electronics on our last two releases, is a former member of Wovenhand. So there’s at least one thread of connection. I’ve always really admired DEE’s work; he’s a powerful example of how to engage the mythic without falling into nostalgia. His songs are mystical and deeply spiritual, but also fiercely iconoclastic – they expose the violence woven into American mythology, and by doing so, speak directly to the present moment.”

S13: How important is the Lux Interna live experience both for yourselves and your audience?

JLI: “I hope it’s an important experience for the audience – I know it is for us. Part of making music is about expressing something that needs to get out, but it’s also about encountering something that can’t be reached in any other way.

“Recording an album moves from the chaos of inception to the cosmos of completion, but you never really leave the chaos behind. The beginning is always lurking in the end, threatening to undo what’s been done so that something new can emerge. A song is never truly finished; its inability to fully express what it longs to say is what keeps it alive. When we play live, I try to tap into that incompleteness – otherwise, performance becomes mechanical repetition.

“Playing live is also about connection for me. It’s about getting out of my head and into the body, into the moment, into a shared current that runs through everyone in the room. We tend to improvise a lot – songs morph into intuitive experiments, off-the-cuff sermons, or walls of shuddering noise. I love when things arise that feel greater than the sum of their parts, when the band seems to breathe as one organism. At its best, this energy spills into the crowd as well.

“I know it’s a gauche to talk about transcendence, but that’s really what we’re after. And when it all comes together, it feels like that. We always try to give that sense of abandon and communion to the audience – to privilege emotion and energy over control or polish. For me, live music is at its best when it’s right on the edge of chaos. And though we’re not a heavy band in the traditional sense, that edge still runs through our best shows. We’re looking forward to bringing that energy back to Europe in late spring and early summer 2026 – hope to see y’all there!”

S13: Being based in San Francisco, it provides an interesting juxtaposition to the music you make. Do you see Lux Interna as a form of escapism?  

JLI: “Well, as I mentioned earlier, although we’re technically based in the Bay Area, Kathryn and I actually live up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in a rural, unincorporated patch of forest. So while the atmosphere of San Francisco might not match our music, the foggy rainforest we live in feels perfectly in tune with it’s been a huge influence on the album. We also spent a lot of time in the Mojave, and some of the songs were written there, so that landscape left its own mark on the record too.

“In a way, I sometimes wish I could experience playing music as escapism. It might help me lighten up a bit! But the truth is – and this probably sounds a little self-serious – Lux Interna has always been anything but that for us. Our music is bound up with our daily efforts to make sense of our lives and to create a home in a world that often feels quite hostile. When I’m performing or writing, I actually feel most connected to the core of things, to whatever still feels real and alive. That doesn’t always make it an easy or comfortable experience, but it’s always a deeply meaningful one. 

“Songs have this strange power to condense experience – to strip away all the noise and burn with the pure fuel of feeling. And I really love music most when it’s right on that edge, when it’s almost too intense to be entertainment.”

S13: How much does Lux Interna reflect your personalities as individuals, and do you see the band as a central figure to your everyday lives?

JLI: “For better or worse, there’s not much daylight between our personal lives and Lux Interna! And especially since Kathyrn and I are life partners as well as being musical collaborators, I feel like each album we’ve made together has defined a period of our lives. It’s an ongoing dialogue. Both of us have other pursuits we are deeply committed to as well – visual art, scholarship, etc., – but it all really meets in the music. Especially this time around. With New Wilderness Gospel, for the first time we wove all these different threads together. And I know that this is a turning point for us – I think we’ll continue to take this approach even deeper in the future.” 

New Wilderness Gospel is out now via Auerbach Tonträger. Purchase from Bandcamp.