Bat for Lashes' cinematic beauty

Bat for Lashes is as much an art project as a band. Singer-songwriter Natasha Khan's sublime melancholy haunts with a cinematic quality that speaks not only to her background in film and music but to her ability to access imagery that seems to lie just behind consciousness.

"I'm managing to tap into that space between sleeping and awake," says Khan, who was reared in England, spent summers in Pakistan and identifies with forebears such as Kate Bush and Björk. "There are notepads under my pillow with all kinds of scribbling . . . sometimes words written on top of one another. I'm just going with my imagination."

In doing so she has captured the imagination of thousands. Her debut album "Fur and Gold" was nominated for England's Nationwide Mercury Prize, and her L.A. debut in July at Spaceland was played to an audience spellbound by the string-laden music and its face-painted players, Khan and cohorts Ginger Lee, Abi Fry and Lizzy Carey.

"The album was just something I made to lift me, to provide transportation for my heart," Khan says. "I didn't realize that other people might also get that out of it."

An earlier tour of the U.S., including a drive down the California coast, inspired some of the album. Andy Bruntel's rapturous video for "Prescilla" was shot, in part, at the "Bat Cave" in the Hollywood Hills.

It's a long way from the triptych projections with soundtracks Khan assembled early in her career at the University of Brighton. Or maybe not. "It's a two-way process," she says. "My songs and my visuals are happening at the same time."

||| See Bat for Lashes perform Tuesday at the Troubadour.

Here's the "Prescilla" video: