Lux - The Window by Fanatic Promotion

“...filled with synthy goodness, fuzzy guitars, and purty purty duets, making them a band worthy of your attention” - Three Imaginary Girls

“It’s My Bloody Valentine assaulting The Raveonettes with an antique synthesizer.” - The Devil Has The Best Tuna

The Seattle-based duo Lux has sewn a unique sleeve to wear its influences on. Inspired by some of the most essential artists of the era of indie and underground music (Pavement, The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, The Magnetic Fields, The Jesus & Mary Chain, New Order, Blondie), this boy-girl duo offers its own take on these sounds with the debut album "We Are Not The Same", set for release on April 3rd, 2012.

Lux was formed in early 2010 when David Chandler, a Seattle transplant from Los Angeles began looking for a girl to form a band with. At the same time, Leah Rosen, a Seattle native with a decade of songwriting experience was looking to team up with a male musician. With some luck (and Craigslist), the pair found each other.

The duo set up shop in Rosen’s basement and set about writing, playing and recording the first Lux songs with Rosen and Chandler trading off on vocals, guitars, synths and drum programming. The tunes immediately found their way onto the internet in the form of the digital EP “Disorders,” released just a scant five months later in July of 2010.

Inspired by the DIY ethics of their heroes, Rosen and Chandler began to relentlessly promote the songs via MySpace (pre-death), gaining the attention of ever-adventurous foreign blogs in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Italy, and Spain, and racking up hundreds of plays a day.

“That was shocking to us,” says Rosen, who had the foresight to begin directing new Lux fans to Facebook where the band has now amassed 8500-plus “likes” – an impressive feat for a self-released, self-promoted act that was already doing everything else itself.

The band also printed up a couple hundred copies of “Disorders” which they mailed out themselves to a list of college radio stations around the country, landing Lux on the playlists of influential stations such as WNYU at New York University and KALX at the University of California at Berkeley. “We didn’t even find out 'til much later,” says Rosen.

Back in the basement to work on "We Are Not The Same", Lux had a chance to plan things out a bit this time around, spending more than enough time on recording. “We re-recorded the album ad nauseum, actually.” says Chandler. “We had two hard drives die on us, back-ups and all, but we just kept going, picking up where we left off. We just kept recording.”

These physical failures became embedded in the art, as over the course of the year making "We Are Not The Same", the album changed forms based on circumstance. The band considered making a concept record but abandoned that idea in favor of a smorgasbord approach, taking cues from some of their favorite records by Sebadoh and The Magnetic Fields.

Lux is still contemplating how it will play live (they never have!) as both Rosen and Chandler are self-confessed control freaks susceptible to the unpredictable nature of the stage. “Really, we just haven’t got around to it yet,” says Chandler. “We were actually offered a tour of Europe, but decided to focus on recording the album instead.”

It’s a good thing that they did as our ears are better for it. Try on the debut Lux album "We Are Not The Same", due for release on April 3rd.