Video concept and creation: Kathryn Ian
"In 'No Arrow,' a tangle of voices and moments meet, intertwine, and transform each other. Here, it’s always 4:00 a.m. You’re stepping out of the roadside bar as the desert winds gently stipple flickering red neon with grains of sand, while the lights from the town in the valley shimmer below like ghosts in the darkness. Or perhaps you’re waking up in the Mojave heat and lighting a cigarette in the motel bed as you watch your sleeping lover bathed in shadows and the shards of electric light that creep in through the holes in the curtains. Or maybe you’re still driving, tired but full of flame, as the car’s headlights are continuously humbled by the vastness of a great nocturnal kingdom. Either way, you feel a mix of calm resolve and wildlife surging up inside you. Your body is awake, a beautiful animal of flesh and fire. It feels like everything that came before has intentionally led you to this moment. But you know that he’s out there, waiting and watching. And there’s a cold and calculating malice in his eyes. This thought used to terrify you. You would have done anything to shake him off your trail. But not anymore. Now you’re ready. You welcome the encounter. Now he’s the one that best beware." --- Lux Interna
Official Lyric Video by Kathryn Ian
"Like Wolves is an invocation of hunger, wildness, and transformation – a spiritual howl in the dark. Both a love song and a battle cry, it prowls the liminal space between sainthood and savagery, where the sacred and the profane tangle together in the fever of the desert night. Written on a restless road trip through the Mojave, the song channels the energy of its vast expanses and all-night dives. Headlights cut through dust; a neon cross flickers in the distance; static-soaked blues haunt the radio waves with warnings from the past. Like Wolves swaggers forward with a warped vision of reverbed 1960s surf guitars, soaring strings, lurching Shangri-Las-esque basslines, and hypnotic rhythms, swerving recklessly between darkness and light, desire and devotion, before converging in an ecstatic embrace of a truth beyond all dualisms. This song is about learning to look unflinchingly into the fiercer face of love learning to be truly alive. While wandering the high desert, 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 far wilder than mere survival. Looking into their eyes, we saw the same fire we sought to feed within us. This song translates sparks of that fire into sound. When your world starts to fall apart, you're forced to make a choice – capitulate or create. Either submit, or bare your teeth and let the wild in. But first, you have to find the space within yourself that is still feral, still free." --- Joshua Levi Ian
Visuals 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 tends to happen 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, and 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!" -- Lux Interna "