Watch The Psychedelic & Satanic New Video By Moonlandingz

Sean Lennon has a new band, weirder and more psychedelic than ever. Whatever you think about his project with girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger – I actually saw them and liked them – this new one may interest you, although Sean is not the frontman this time. Moonlandingz is a side project featuring Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi on vocals, Saul Adamczewski on guitar, members of U.K. electronic avant-garde group the Eccentronic Research Council (ERC) beside Sean and Charlotte. Sean was very enthusiastic when he saw Fat White Family at SXSW last year, and he became good friends with the band members.

‘The whole thing was born basically out of this fictional fantasy,’ said Sean Lennon explaining that the Eccentronic Research Council and Fat White Family teamed up for ‘Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan’, a largely spoken-word record about a fictional band called the Moonlandingz. ‘It’s done quite well in England,’ he added. ‘It started as a fictional band, and it sort of stepped through the fourth wall — like Purple Rose of Cairo or something.’

The band has a first video for ‘Sweet Saturn Mine (Sean Lennon De-Mix)’, directed by Charlotte Muhl and shot in a dance hall in England. Basically, it is a video by a fictional band about a sort of fictional cult, with a lot of satanic and esoteric imagery. Lias Saoudi’s vocals are lugubrious to the core, the lighting is machiavellian green and the glaucous organ dominates a very atmospheric psychedelia with a sacrifice by sword at the end? Calm down it is just a joke. ERC’s Adrian Flanagan explained to NME the making of the video:

‘We hooked up in private with Sean to record some parts in an undisclosed ex-air raid shelter in south Yorkshire, in the north of England. Sean took the recorded parts away back to his studio in NYC, added his own thing and deconstructed the track – we were blown away by what he brought to it, Sean’s such a talented musician.

We also did a video for the track with him and Charlotte Kemp Muhl in the basement of a 1920s cinema in Sheffield; there’s a staircase down there that goes nowhere, to a bricked-up doorway that’s haunted by a child spectre, which wasn’t so good for the camera crew who got accidentally locked in the building late in the night after the shoot by the owners. They were petrified when I spoke to them, unable to talk about what they had seen, but you could just tell something had put the ‘willies’ up them, I think one of them is having therapy now. I thought it was hilarious.

Doing the video with Charlotte was great fun, she’s like a psychedelic mad auntie crossed with Edie Bouvier Beale from Grey Gardens. The video is kind of a parody of those Anton LaVey films and old Hammer Horror films from the late ’60s/early ’70s. There’s bound to be some morons who take offense in the imagery used, but that’s only because they believe in something different, that also doesn’t exist!”

According to Rolling Stone it is a sort of a ‘Luciferian Kenneth Anger cult ritual,’ with Lennon playing a ‘gypsy wizard.’ Moonlandingz will release a 10-inch EP on Lennon and Muhl’s label Chimera Music on October 30th and so far they only have dates in England and Scotland.