Our Redesigned Website and How It Came To Be

A few days ago, we decided we needed to breath some new life into our website. The old format simply lacked the excitement and energy that defines our music. We knew that visually capturing the essence of Luxe Canyon required coming up with an image of some sort. Kyle had the idea to form letters out leaf stems, and place them over a bed of dead, brown, wet leaves. He took a picture of this arrangement and imported it into photoshop. With some inverting and tweaking of colors, he produced this surreal picture seen below:

Not only do we feel this picture represents us, but so does the process in which it was created. Music, at its core, is about creating something out of nothing. Similarly, this unearthly image was produced from a pile of debris. This goes to show that there is potential in anything, one only needs the mindset and motivation to harness that potential. Luxe Canyon strives to keep this in mind with everything we do.

In addition to the new look, we have added some photos to the media section with a few snaps from our first show, and some others we found lying around the corners of our computers. That being said, check out the website! 

LuxeCanyon.com's new look!

We've just totally revamped our site! In addition to the design changes, our media section now includes photos! But don't take our word for it, see for yourself!

Album review!

"Luxe Canyon's debut LP is strikingly well-produced electro pop."

We're pretty pumped on our first piece of press in the online magazine Reverb, a subsection of Seattle Weekly.  Read the full review here!

First Show Success!

Well, we finally took the plunge into Seattle's live music scene with our first show at the Nectar Lounge. Contrary to previous posts, we decided to ditch Pro Tools as a live sequencer entirely. This meant recreating all of the synth patches from scratch within our synths, a Kurzweil K2000 and M-Audio Venom. This decision was made merely a week before the show, so we had a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. Though the last patch was finished just a few hours before the show, they all turned out great.

We couldn't be more pleased with how the show went. Wiscon and Screens started the night out right with a variety of smooth to abrasive sounds and visual accompaniments. Their energy got us really excited and anxious to play! But the element that really made the night was the audience. From the moment we stepped on stage, we felt the love. This made it super easy to play and have fun all night. We even got an unexpected encore! Here are a few photos from our good friend Andrew Mark Snyder:

Kyle Nielsen, lead vocals, guitar, synth, drum pad.

Matt Nielsen, synth, back-up vocals, drum pad.

Hank Haggard, bass.

Brian Joyce, drums.

And some others from various cell phones and such:

Thanks to everyone who made it out and supported us and to all those who didn't know us but still stuck around and gave us a chance. We greatly appreciate you all.

If you couldn't make it that night, fear not, we are playing the High Dive on January 9th with Goldbar and Steph Macpherson. Hope to see you there!

The CDs are here!

We are pleased to announce that physical copies of the Luxe Canyon self-titled debut album have arrived! They turned out beautifully, with artwork by our good friend Jake Knapp. Pick up yours today at the next Luxe Canyon live show!

Pre-Sale Tickets for 12/2 Show!

Pre-sale tickets for our December 2nd show with Screens at Nectar Lounge are available! Do yourself a favor and save $2! You can buy them here, or by conveniently crossing paths with Kyle or myself (Matt). Hope to see you there!

Nectar Lounge and the inevitable CD

We have it confirmed: we will be playing at Nectar Lounge in Fremont on Dec. 2nd. For all the details, check out the shows section on our website. You should also check out one of the bands we'll be playing with, Screens. Pretty cool stuff.

Also, it became clear that the CD artwork needed a bit of tweaking after looking at a proof sent to us by the manufacturing company. Never fear, though, for we have sent them a freshly tweaked version as of yesterday. We expect the CDs to be in our possession in about two weeks, just in time for our first show.

CDs, record release party, shows

We now have an estimated date of arrival for the physical CDs: November 12th. However, it will probably not be until the end of November that the CDs are available for purchase through CD Baby. If you want a copy as soon as possible, shoot us an email and we'll work something out, through Paypal or some other method. Another way to get a CD would be to come to our record release party...

Sometime around the week of November 12th will be our record release party. We'll be playing our live set and we'll have CDs available for purchase at a discounted price. The exact date and location is yet to be determined. Keep checking our website for further updates!

Live shows, nerd stuff, etc.

So, we've just ordered 300 physical copies of our debut album to be produced. Woot! Artwork was done by Mr. Jake Knapp, a laborious process for which we owe him a great debt of gratitude, not just for making a great looking product, but also for not throttling the life out of us at the end of it. The CDs will hopefully be arriving in a few weeks so for all you people holding out for a physical copy, mark your calendars!

As far as live shows are concerned, we have a few new recruits, a bassist and a drummer to be precise. They are working diligently to master this new set, as are Matt and I, and we expect to have shows lined up pretty soon. For all you fellow musicians and audio nerds out there, you might be interested in some risky logistical maneuvers we're going to be trying out.

Most notable of these choices is using Pro Tools 10 as a live sequencer. I know what you're thinking. And no, Pro Tools is not an ideal program for live performance, and yes, there is a chance it could crash mid-song or mid-set. The reasoning behind this choice is that much of the album was recorded in Pro Tools and many of the sounds came from the AIR virtual instruments that are native to Pro Tools, which as you may know cannot be used in other (more traditional) live sequencing programs such as Ableton Live. We have tried to replicate the sounds by writing patches from scratch in our Kurzweil K2000 and M-Audio Venom keyboards, and I must say, we got very close, but in the end they just didn't sound quite right. So, we have pretty much decided to use Pro Tools as basically a synth module, in order to get the same sounds and effects from the album in our live performance and it's been working out great so far.

For these first few shows, we'll be playing songs that don't require any playback of backing tracks, so Pro Tools should be pretty stable, since we won't be pressing the play button, just sending MIDI to the VI's. However, soon enough we'll be including songs on our set list that do require some backing tracks, so I'll be interested to see how Pro Tools holds up once we have to rely on it for playback and as a synth module. The real hiccup in the plan is that we also made a few of the songs on the album in Logic and those songs will definitely require some playback of backing tracks... So, I guess we'll be testing the stability of Logic in a live setting as well! Finally, there's one song that will be performed in Ableton Live on an APC40. Most likely we'll rewire Ableton into PT so that, again, we can use the same PT VI's from the album. The tricky part here is that when you rewire Ableton to PT, Ableton no longer likes to recognize the APC40. So, to get around this obvious flaw in the program, you have to use a little program called Soundflower. It's basically just a way to route audio from one program to another within your Mac. It's made by the same people who created Max/MSP, which, if you haven't heard of it, you should really check out if you're interested in being able to write any patch you could possibly dream of. Using Soundflower also has the benefit of not forcing PT and Ableton to sync up, so you don't have to worry about things like conflicting tempo changes and such.

Anyway, that's about enough audio-speak for one day. If I haven't bored you into a slumber by now, please keep checking out our website for show dates and info on how to get a physical copy of our CD.

Welcome to our blog!

Our blog is now up and running! Lengthy tirades and long-winded revelations abound!

This is where you can find all of the behind-the-scenes commentary regarding our live shows, recording process, and everything else that makes the band tick.

Our official website (luxecanyon.com) is our headquarters. Make sure to check in on it regularly to stay up to date with upcoming shows, new music, photos, videos...

Listen to songs off our debut album for free in our media section! We will also have physical CDs available very soon. They will be available on our CD Baby site and at live shows.

Right now, we're busy rehearsing for live shows, so keep an eye on our shows section!