BUZZ BANDS

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 Music 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.

Mastering art of song

“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.”

Bat for Lashes performs Tuesday at the Troubadour.

So busy, it’s a Pity

The Pity Party has a whirlwind weekend ahead. On Saturday afternoon the L.A. duo will bang out an afternoon set at the LA Weekly Detour Festival -- they won an online vote to fill a local band slot -- then high-tail it to play the Eagle Rock Music Festival.

Flustered? Not the Pity Party’s wisecracking female half, Heisenflei (born Julie Edwards). “We’re going to have to figure out how to pace our drinking and when to take naps,” she says.

But why worry about pacing now -- the duo’s frenetically robotic, yelpy pop has quenched L.A. hipsters’ thirst for something fresh since its January residency at the Silverlake Lounge, and Indie 103.1 (KDLD-FM) gave airplay to the single “Dronebots and Peons for Eons and Eons.” The Raveonettes even chose the Pity Party for a summer tour; now the duo is finishing recording its album with Manny Nieto.

Heisenflei teamed up with her old Buckley High classmate, M (Marc Smollin), two years ago. She plays drums, sings and triggers the bass lines on a Yamaha keyboard; he provides looping guitar-scapes and vocals. The result is “angular, and a little bit weird,” Heisenflei says. “People who like our music, there’s something wrong with them.”

Heisenflei cites a litany of influences, including David Bowie, Brian Eno and her brother Greg’s current and former bands, Autolux and Lusk.

The Pity Party’s sonic anxiety seems to contradict Heisenflei’s other endeavor -- she has a knitting shop in Atwater Village. “With knitting you have two needles and with drumming you have two sticks,” she says. “You can hear a lot of knitting influences in our music.”

Fast forward

* Touts: Downtown’s Detour Festival packs a lot onto four stages Saturday, and overlapping set times will make for some tough choices. The don’t-miss acts? The Aggrolites at 3:05 p.m.; the Deadly Syndrome at 3:40; the Noisettes at 4:50; Autolux at 6:40; Moving Units at 7:55; Justice at 9:10. Coin toss? Bloc Party and Turbonegro each starts at 10. . . . It will be less frantic at the free Eagle Rock Music Festival along Colorado Boulevard. Last year’s event proved a warm neighborhood experience. This year, Latin Grammy nominee Chuchito Valdes is playing, along with the likes of Dengue Fever, Under the Influence of Giants, Mia Doi Todd, and the Monolators.

-- Kevin Bronson