Kevin Bronson on December 9th, 2008

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It’s not exactly a revelation to think of the music by new L.A. quartet Robotanists as “cinematic” — the previous project in which husband-and-wife principals Sarah Ellquist and Daniel de Blanke were involved, Loma Lynda, was a multimedia collective (including filmmaker Jason Bognacki) that fused movies and rock.

“It was exhausting,” Ellquist says. “So many bands now have a visual element, but it’s very labor-intensive. We decided to trade it in and do straight-up music. We wanted to be able to pick up and play.”

• ||| Download: “Wait a Minute Here”

On their debut EP “Close Down the Woods,” Robotanists root around in the electro-noir explored by Mazzy Star and Portishead, with Ellquist’s sultry voice narrating the way through forays into the dark both metaphorical and literal. Their penchant for the atmospheric never becomes an overbearing aesthetic, though — you can take the title of one of their songs, “Subtlety Is Underrated,” seriously.

As songwriters, Ellquist and de Blanke — both of whom studied music at USC, she in classical bass, he in classical guitar — bond over guilty pleasures such as ELO while working through the possibly treacherous process of exchanging confessional song ideas with your spouse.

“We do a lot of songwriting together, but we do a lot independently too,” Ellquists says. “You have to take any song and … make it its own. I like to personify things — ‘You’ might mean a city that I hated living in. He often brings songs that are fully realized to me, and it’s a matter of changing the ‘shes’ to ‘hes.'”

Now grouped with bassist Keith Boyarsky and drummer Preston Scott Phillips, Ellquist and de Blanke still aspire to make music with evocative imagery. “Doing the film stuff was cool — it was all about making an all-sensory experience,” she says. But even without visuals, “we still want to make music that has a feeling.

||| Live: Robotanists, joined by Two Guns, among others, play Spaceland tonight.

Photo by Susan Phillips