LUX INTERNA
ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT / FIRST SINGLE RELEASE
New Wilderness Gospel
May 2, 2025 | 2 CD Book | Vinyl | Digital
Dear Friends,
I’m thrilled to announce that our forthcoming album, New Wilderness Gospel, will be released by Auerbach Tonträger on May 2, 2025, as a gatefold double LP (black & limited blue marble editions) and in a deluxe 72-page artbook edition.
This release is more than an album—it is the first installation of a larger multimedia project, weaving music, text, and visual art into an emergent world.
The artbook edition features:
Lyrics & extensive liner notes
Polaroid and 35mm photographs by Kathryn
Ten chapters from an experimental novel by Joshua
A fully scored audiobook of the text
Today, we mark the first threshold—the unveiling of our inaugural single, “Into Night,” and a meditational lyric video crafted by Kathryn.
Kathryn and I are so grateful to have been joined by an incredible community of musicians on this release.
At the heart of New Wilderness Gospel are the ever-present voices of myself, Kathryn, and Kris T. Force (Amber Asylum, AEAEA). But this album also bears the fingerprints of many gifted hands, and we want to recognize the extraordinary artists who helped bring it to life:
Jackie Perez Gratz (Grayceon, Amber Asylum)
Jeff Linsenmaier (Wovenhand, Czars, Keith Urban)
Tim Gotch (Sleepbomb)
Adam Torruella
Each of them brought something singular, something luminous, something essential to this work. We are over the moon about what we’ve created together—and we can’t wait to share it with you.
On that note, we’d also like to offer our sincere thanks to those who were part of the recording, mixing, and mastering — Jack Shirley (Atomic Gardens), Doug White (Watchmen Studios), and Tim Green (Louder).
There is much to share, so we’ll get right to it: below, you’ll find exclusive details on New Wilderness Gospel.
And as always, we love hearing from you—be a stranger to the world, but not to us.
Wishing you inner light in this dark night of dark nights,
Joshua
“Into Night”
Lyric Video by Kathryn Ian
“Into Night” is the oceanic heart of New Wilderness Gospel. Musically, it weaves together many of the diverse tones and textures that define the album; lyrically, it captures a pivotal moment of transformation in the narrative arc.
Written in our mountain cabin in Northern California during a series of severe and unrelenting storms, the piece attempts to capture the uncanny blurring and blending of inner and outer landscapes that can occur during periods of prolonged absence from anthropocentric environments. In this world, the trees sway madly, their branches wave and scrape and scratch wildly against the thick hide of the night sky; it feels as though they’d tear the moon down for company if they could. Then the static of the storm and the howls of the wind slowly coagulate into music. Into a message. And the whiskey in your glass conspires with the torrential rain to wash away the illusion of chronological time.
Here, St. John’s “dark night of the soul” opens up to an even older, wilder darkness. And in this darkness, a pure, sparkling moment of presence. God is there. And the dead are alive again. And the night reveals its hidden face as mercy, as the possibility of redemption. Or so the old mountain stories would have it—but who knows how reliable those storytellers are? They certainly spend too much time alone in the deep woods to be trusted!
New Wilderness Gospel | Deluxe 72-page Artbook edition with bonus disc featuring an experimental audiobook
The Origin of New Wilderness Gospel
A close friend of ours floated the phrase “deconstructed cinema” to describe NWG, and we think that’s pretty accurate – we’ve endeavored to provide many ways into the wilderness, but it’s up to the individual imagination to create a map – no experience of the wilderness should be the same! We’ll continue to offer more pathways into the wilderness here, so stay tuned.
The last few decades have seen a flurry of cultural production on the theme of “ecological apocalypse” in the sense of cataclysm, mass extinction, or end-of-the-world scenarios. The album, New Wilderness Gospel, is part of a larger ongoing multimedia work that envisions an anthropocenic apocalypse of a more complex nature by returning to the premodern notion of apocalypse as an act of "uncovering" or "revelation" (apokalyptein) as well as a crisis.
We wrote and recorded the album during a time defined by encounters with massive forces of destruction far beyond our control—the global pandemic, forest fires in Northern California, and the extreme polarization of American society—as well as personal struggles with depression and economic precarity. In short, it was a deeply unsettling time. But to borrow a line from Emerson: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
When your world begins to fall apart, you’re forced to make a choice—capitulate or create! Either you let meaning slowly bleed out of your life or you start gathering the sparks of significance that remain and set about the task of dreaming up a new mythology, constructing shelters that can withstand the harsh weather of the present, and building alternate bridges between the past and the future. But first you must find a space within yourself that is still wild, a place that hasn’t been “settled”—and therefore dominated—by the values and world-making forces of the society you are embedded within.
This song cycle is part of a larger project of world-building in a more-than-metaphorical sense. The songs are populated by voices, characters, and landscapes that echo our own lives and the lives of those we are entwined with, and yet, in our understanding, also possess their own independent reality. New Wilderness Gospel is both an attempt to build a home amidst the storm and to throw the doors wide open to the wildness of the future.
We hope to cross paths with you somewhere in this wild territory!