Lights & Motion

Lights & Motion is a Swedish cinematic post-rock musical project, founded in Gothenburg 2012 by Christoffer Franzén. The project came into life after a long period of insomnia,where Christoffer chose to spend his nights in a studio in Gothenburg, writing music. The music has been described as cinematic in quality and in its reoccurring use of big crescendos. The band has so far released four full-length albums, Reanimation, Save Your Heart, Chronicle, Dear Avalanche, and one mini-album Bloom, all released through the American independent record label Deep Elm Records.Music from Lights & Motion have been used in many filmtrailers, commercials and TV-shows, ranging from The Oscars to the Super Bowl. in 2015, Apple featured the bands music in their global iTunes Campaign, "Latest Films. Anywhere, Anytime." In December 2013, Lights & Motion was voted as "The Best New Artist" in the annual polls by Post-rock on Facebook, the world's largest post-rock community.

Formation Lights & Motion was formed in Gothenburg, Sweden in early 2012 by native musician Christoffer Franzén. Originally meant as an outlet during a period of insomnia, the project was supposed to reflect the sense of a dreamlike state in which a lot of the first album was written in. However, the project quickly garnered a lot of attention online, mainly in the alternative and postrock scene,which led to them being signed by famous American independent record label Deep Elm Records, previously home to bands such as The Appleseed Cast and other prominent alternative acts. Originally a guitarist, Franzén started to experiment with writing and recording music by himself in 2011/2012, and soon came to the conclusion that just writing with the guitar was too limiting. This led to him being forced to quickly pick up all the other instruments that he felt he needed, in order to fill the space that he heard in his head. I would try all these different instruments and record myself over and over in layers, so that I could make it sound huge and not just like one guy in a dark room. I just had such a need for control and I knew exactly what I wanted, so I ended up doing every single thing by myself. I learned all the instruments I needed for what I could hear in my head, and I recorded and recorded and recorded until my ears bled, and slowly I got better at it. “” Christoffer Franzén in an interview in 2013. Being a self-taught musician in every aspect, Christoffer also learned how to produce, engineer and mix his own works. Lights & Motion is known for their extensive use of ambient and atmospheric productions, combined with very melodic writing.

Reanimation was written in a period between late 2011 and December 2012, and was then released worldwide on January 16, 2013 through Deep Elm Records. It is the debut album of Lights & Motion, and it contains 13 original songs. The album introduced what has since become a trademark sound for the band, in its fusion of dreamy, melodic guitars backed with strings, lush synthesizers and pounding drums.Although setting the tone for the band's future releases, Reanimation stands out in that it features a much more prominent use of guitars as the leading instrument. The song "Faded Fluorescence" was used in the 2015 Super Bowl trailer for Furious 7, and "Home" was used in the tv-spots for the movie Collateral Beauty.

On November 12, 2013, Lights & Motion released their sophomore album titled Save Your Heart, only 10 months after their debut album Reanimation was released. This slightly unorthodox approach of releasing two full-length albums in one year was explained by the band as them "not being able to stop writing".The album contains 11 songs, and it was written and recorded during 2013. When compared to its predecessor, Save Your Heart is much more based around piano and synthesizers, and less around guitars. Franzén can be heard in several interviews talking about how he can "hear sounds as colors", and he has stated about the new album; "I wanted Save Your Heart to have more of a blueish or violet color in terms of sonic identity. In comparison, Reanimation had more of a yellowish tone'.The opening song of the album, "Heartbeats", was used in the trailer for the motion picture Concussion (Concussion (2015 film)), starring Will Smith.

The band released their third full-length album called Chronicle , on January 13th 2015, through Deep Elm Records.The album contains 9 songs and ranges in style from Post-rock/ambient, to feature elements of film music. This record is considered being the bands most cinematic accomplishment to date.

In the summer of 2016, the band announced on their Facebook page that their 4th full-length album would be released in early 2017, through Deep Elm Records. On November 17th Lights & Motion released a Official Trailer for the upcoming album, where they stated that the record would be called Dear Avalanche, and would be released worldwide on 1/20/17. Later the same year they released the single We Only Have Forever (Quiet), which featured a minimalistic and slowed down re-interpretation of the song, played on the piano. In 2017 Apple chose to include two of the bands songs in their Memories Function available on all Apple devices globally. The song "Anamorphic" was heavily featured in the trailer for the film Skyscraper (2018 film), which was launched after 2018´s Super Bowl at The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

In late 2017 it was announced by Christoffer Franzén that he had spent the better part of a year writing a new mini-album that Lights & Motion was going to be releasing in the first couple of months of 2018. It is called Bloom (Lights & Motion album), and consists of five songs that all somehow or another ties into the changing of seasons, and specifically the long Swedish winters.